


Vincit Qui Se Vincit

by Deviant_Accumulation



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Brainwashing, But He Gets Better, Harry Lives, M/M, Memory Loss, Mind Control, Pre-Slash, featuring Harry as brainwashed amnesiac assassin, slowly, winter soldier au-esque
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-25
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-19 15:39:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3615288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deviant_Accumulation/pseuds/Deviant_Accumulation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The woman takes a gun out of her jacket and hands it to him. “Shoot him,” she says.<br/>The gun feels familiar in his hands, a trusted weight he knows even if he can't remember anything else. He lifts it in one fluid motion and pulls the trigger.<br/>A perfect round hole appears in the man’s forehead and his head falls back as blood splatters to the ground. The woman smiles at him and he wonders why he wants to scream.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He wakes up.

Consciousness comes to him slowly. Slower than it should at least, with his mind struggling towards it as if he were drunk. A Kingsman learns early how to wake without making a sound or changing his breathing, so he takes a few moments to try to gather himself as much as he can and keeps his eyes closed.

He’s lying on a bed, sheets drawn up to his chest, and what he assumes must be a simple shirt and pants clings to his body. There are straps, winding themselves around his wrists and ankles, not quite comfortable but padded enough that they don’t chafe too much. For his own protection, or for keeping him prisoner? He tries to remember, but cannot come up with much – in fact remembering seems unusually hard, and his mind struggling to access memories and the whole process making his head ache. A head injury maybe?

He can hear steps coming closer, so he keeps his eyes shut – if he’s really in the hands of the enemies he might gain an advantage by making them think that he’s still unconscious.

The steps come to a halt beside his bed –; he thinks three people from the sound of it, at least one of them heavier and likely male, all with flat shoes.

He hears the characteristic click of a switch and with a whirring sound a harsh bright light is turned on, shining directly on his face, easily shining through his eye lids.

“Open your eyes,” a voice above him commands, female, Canadian accent, estimative in her forties. He considers trying to play the ruse for a bit longer- just to see what they will do- but visuals are key, so he opens his eyes, and blinks against the harsh light.

Aside from the lamp the room is dark and against its brightness he can barely make out the silhouettes of the people standing at his bedside. His hope of waking up in a Kingsman facility dwindles.

“What is your name?” The same voice asks. He opts for staying silent –. Of course he could use a civilian alias, but at the moment he is at a severe disadvantage information-wise and it is unlikely that his captors will fall for it. They are more likely to torture him then but he can hold out for a fairly long time; long enough for Merlin and the other Kingsman to come and rescue him. It’s one of their basic principles: Kingsman never leave behind one of their own.

“Who are you?” The woman asks again.

He just starts wondering how long they are going to be asking this nicely, when the lamp above him flashes, bright white turning into blood red and then it starts to flicker, a rapid on and off that makes his head hurt.

“Who are you?” He can hear the voice but it sounds as if he were underwater.

“I-“ he starts, then hastily snaps his mouth shut. He hadn’t meant to answer, but the response had been nearly instinctual. He distantly thinks that something is very, very wrong with him, but thinking is starting to feel very hard. All he can focus on is the flickering red light. He tries to will himself to look away, to shut his eyes, but his body doesn’t seem to be his own and the feeling is somehow eerily familiar when it really shouldn’t be; a déjà-vu to something he has- has forgotten? He starts to strain against the manacles around his wrists and ankles, anything to escape the merciless red light. He now notices that the red light is also familiar, and he tries to hold on to that, tries to make the memories resurface, but everything feels fractured. Images of faceless people looking down on him, of pain and of words repeated and repeated but making no sense, and above it all the red light.

He dimly registers the people around him talking, can make out pieces like ‘more time’ and ‘nearly done’ and there’s a terrible noise in his ears – he doesn’t know what it is but he knows that he is afraid, that he needs it to stop. He wants to scream to block out the noise but he can’t make his mouth move so the cry stays stuck in his throat, suffocating him.

When he feels the needle piercing his skin, pushing a sedative into his bloodstream, and he welcomes the merciful silent darkness with open arms.

 

 

He wakes up.

He opens his eyes, and sees a white ceiling. Turning his head he takes in what looks a bit like a hospital room, monitors and machines standing around his bed. Amongst them, a tall lamp. He hastily looks away, then wonders why.

There are no windows, but there is one door, reinforced and with a single doorknob, no keyhole, at least on his side. Not that he could move – his body is strapped to the bed. His throat feels sore and hurts when he tries to speak, as if he had screamed himself hoarse.

His mind feels fuzzy – he’s sure that he has woken up in this room before – the lamp was there too, and other times in between. Sometimes there were people too he thinks. Sometimes just light and pain.

The word comes abruptly to his mind. He wonders what it means – he knows it’s important, but he doesn’t know why. Just a vague sense of desperation, of clinging to the word that has now lost its meaning. His head hurts the more he thinks about it, but he still tries to. He thinks he remembers a face – someone bald, with a strong nose and glasses (the glasses are important too, aren’t they?). And another, this person younger, with brown hair and a lopsided grin. Are they someone he knows? Are they the ones who locked him up here? He doesn’t get the initial feeling of dread he feels when remembering the light, but then he can’t be sure that it means that they didn’t do this to him.

The door opens and four men step in. Military training he thinks, judging from stature and the way they move. They halt next to his bed, two at each side, and start undoing the shackles. Two of them heave him up at the arms, half-dragging, half-carrying him towards the door. He lets himself fall as dead-weight between them, bare feet skidding over the floor. His shoulders protests at the strain, but appearing to be only half-conscious is the easiest way to make the men underestimate him. He has a feeling that wherever they were taking him would surely not be a good place to be.

One man is behind him, another in front of him and the two at his sides, surrounding him completely. But they will have to break their formation at the door. The moment the first guy steps through the door, he acts. Hooking one leg under that of his right guard, he uses it to yank his leg up, at the same time wrenching his arm out of his grip and smashes his forearm against his throat, tipping him over and then swinging to punch the left guard in the throat.

Before the front man turns around two of his colleagues are down. Sadly the one behind him isn’t as slow to act and grabs him from behind, trying to put him in a chokehold. He reaches behind himself with both hands, finding the other man’s face and pushing his thumbs right into his eyes. The man screams, loosening his hold and he knocks him out with an uppercut to the jaw.

The front man comes barrelling at him and he dodges the arm he tries to grab him with, taking a hold of his wrist and dragging him forward and alongside of his position, aided by the man’s own momentum. He wrenches the man’s arm behind him, places his free hand on his shoulder blade and pushes. The man falls down, his arm bending at the wrong angle and finally dislocating at the shoulder with a nasty ‘pop’ and the man shouts, until he knocks him out with a kick to the head.

With his guards out for the count he quickly searches them for weapons. All he finds is an army knife in one the man’s pockets. He takes it with him, for lack of better options. He glances up and takes in the cameras both in his room and in the hall. If their security is good he probably has not even minutes until reinforcements come barging in, so he decides to get a move on. Darting out into the hall he looks left and right, but in both directions are just white walls with more doors, so he opts for left.

His muscles protest when he starts running, making him wonders how long he truly has been here, but for now the best he can do is push the pain aside and try to escape. The hallway after the corner brings more white walls and even less doors. He tries one of them on a whim, stumbling into what appears to be a laboratory, the smell of disinfectant hitting him in the face as he opens the door. A man in a lab coat is hunched over one of the banks and drops the beaker he was holding as he bursts into the room. He’s just about to surge forward and shake him until he spills the location of the nearest exit when he hears the trampling of heavy boots behind him.

He whirls around – the sound is coming from where his room lay, so he starts running in the opposite direction, out of the lab and down the hallway, hoping to make it to the corner before he gets within shooting range of his pursuers. He’s nearly there when another team turns around the corner, dressed in heavy SWAT gear and carrying assault rifles. He stumbles to an abrupt halt, turning around just as his pursuers catch up, running towards him from the other end of the hall.

Panicking, he looks around, but there’s nowhere to go, no doors he can escape through, just two white walls and enemies at both ends of the hall, at least numbering a dozen in each team, their guns trained on him. He tightens the grips around the knife, turning his back on the wall and raising his only weapon. If he is going down, it won’t be without at least trying to fight.

For a few moments no one moves, his breathing sounding harsh in his own ears. The few moments stretch on and he starts wishing that they would just get on with it and shoot him point blank, when he hears the sound of heels clicking on the linoleum floor. He feels himself tensing without wanting to.

The team to his left parts to let through a woman, white, somewhere in her forties with high cheekbones, dressed in a simple black dress long enough to cover her knees. He shies away as she gets closer, his heart rate quickening and it takes him a moment to recognize what he feels as fear. The trained killers with their rifles don’t scare him, but this woman makes his throat constrict in panic with only her presence.

She comes to a halt a few steps away from him – just a bit too far away for him to be able to hit her and not getting taken out by the men surrounding them before then.

“Drop the weapon,” she says. His fingers clench around the hilt of the knife, knuckles turning white. He should drop the knife. He is supposed to drop the weapon.

“Obey me,” the woman says, impatience punctuating her words. Pain flashes through his head, sharp and bright and he reaches up to clutch his forehead, trying to alleviate the agony, sinking back against the wall. The woman is still looking at him, her face without mercy and he clenches his eyes shut, unable to look back at her. “Stop resisting,” she hisses at him. “There’s no one going to come for you. Obey. Me.” she repeats and he gasps as the pain increases, his grip on the handle loosening until the knife falls out of his hand, clattering on the floor.

The pain stops and he sucks in a shaking breath.

“See how easy it can be?” the woman asks, her voice turning gentle. He feels a touch on his face and opens his eyes to see the woman looking down at him, one hand carefully cupping his cheek. “Just do as I tell you and I don’t have to hurt you, alright?”

“Yes,” he whispers, his voice hoarse. Obey. The woman looks at him, a satisfied smile on her lips.

“Very good,” she tells him, patting his cheek before stepping back. “Go back to your room.”

He rises up and walks, the group of men parting to let him through. Obey. Obey.

 

 

He wakes up.

There’s a mirror in a bathroom and he doesn’t recognize the face that looks back at him. Sometimes when he gets dressed he will shakily trace the scars that marr his skin, unable to recall the stories behind them.

Every other day a woman comes and visits him. She tells him that he got the scars in line of his job, when he helped their organization get rid of bad people. When he asks why he can’t remember she tells him it’s because he had an accident – a mission gone wrong, where he sustained a head injury.

The doctors give him pills, to help with his memory loss, they say. They make his head feel numb, but they lessen the headaches he gets sometimes. They urge him to tell them anything he might recall, anything he dreams of.

He doesn’t see any dreams anymore. There are no images, just the black of his eyelids, but sometimes he hears sounds. Of dogs barking, of the muffled sound a gun with a silencer makes and of church music.

The doctors smile when he tells them, a mechanic uplifting of the corner of their lips, the expression not reaching their eyes, and they give him more pills. The dreams stop after a while.

Every day he trains. While his mind might have lost his memories, his body still remembers, and it remembers a lot. It takes him a while to regain the muscle mass he lost while he was confined to a hospital bed, but when he does, fighting comes like a second nature to him. They put him up against other fighters, one on one at first, then multiple coming at once, and he all beats them, moving effortlessly like he never did anything else.

Sometimes the woman comes to watch him, her eyes sharp like a hawk’s and filling him with unease.

“Come with me,” she says one day, speaking for the first time since she has been coming into the gym. He is dripping with sweat and out of breath but he follows, trailing behind her through white hallways and into one of the rooms.

It is dark inside, the only light coming from a naked bulb hanging from the bare concrete ceiling. Under it is a man, sitting in a metal chair, gagged and bound, blood dripping from his nose.

The woman takes a gun out of her jacket and hands it to him. “Shoot him,” she says.

The gun feels familiar in his hands, a trusted weight he knows, and he lifts it in one fluid motion and pulls the trigger.

A perfect round hole appears in the man’s forehead and his head falls back. The woman smiles at him, and he wonders why he wants to scream.

 

“Mordred,” she calls him, like it should have a meaning, but it doesn’t for him. The name is unfamiliar and he wonders if it is his, or if it is new, but he knows better than to ask. She makes him kill other people, in all sorts of ways, and sometimes he lies awake at night and is scared that he always knows exactly how to twist someone’s neck, how deep he has to shove his fingers into someone’s eyes to reach their brain, how long he has to constrict someone’s throat until he knows for sure that they won’t breathe again.

He doesn’t know why those people have to die. The woman just tells him that they are testing his abilities and mental state, but never who all these men and women are. She tells him not to think about them – that he doesn’t need his empathy, that it will only make him weak and stop him from doing what needs to be done.

He has lost count of how many days he has been here – to him it feels like he never has been anywhere else. All he can remember are the white walls of the facility, so maybe it really is all there is to him.

Only sometimes, he imagines something different. A green lawn, an old manor, dark wood and oil paintings. Full of warmth, not of cold like the facility. He wonders where he has seen a house like that, or if he never did and it is just a fantasy his mind likes to entertain. Still, he covets it, clings to it when he can’t sleep at night.

 

“We’ve decided to let you get back into the field,” the woman tells him one morning, standing in the doorway to his room. She hands him a dossier. “You will find all the information on your target you will need in here. Do not disappoint us.” Her voice has an edge to it at the last words and he notes that he doesn’t want to find out what will happen should he fail.

He opens the dossier. Inside is a photo of a blond young man with bright blue eyes, wearing a baseball cap. ‘Gary Unwin’, the file reads. ‘Codename: Galahad.’

“Kill him,” the woman says, and Mordred nods.


	2. Chapter 2

According to the intel, his target will be at a restaurant in South London at 1300. Across the street is an office building, four stories high with a flat rooftop. The security is minimal and he easily slips past the staff and the cameras, the hood of his raincoat obscuring his face to anyone he might pass. The sniper rifle is heavy, unassembled and hidden in a viola case. ‘How cliché,’ he thinks, then wonders where that thought came from.

He is at the rooftop half an hour before his target is due to arrive, scouring out the location. At the side away from the street is a fire escape, which might come in handy later. Aside from the exit and a few concrete blocks that hide part of the buildings ventilation system the roof is barren and he has to lie flat on his stomach to avoid being seen from the street.

His right eye itches and he resist the urge to rub it. Before he left the doctors had implanted a contact lens, to help him with his mission, as they said. For monitoring him, they didn’t say, but they didn’t make much of an effort to hide the screens that were transmitting everything he could see. Still, it does have quite a few practical features, such as the ability to zoom in and an infrared filter, not that he needs either of those for this mission.

His earpiece crackles. “Target ETA 1 minute,” it says and he assembles the rifle with a few well-practiced motions. There is no wind, no blinding sun, not too many people on the sidewalk. A perfect shot.

The target arrives in a black cab. Through the windows he can see that there’s a woman with him, petite but she holds herself with the posture of a killer when she exits the door towards the street. The young man comes out of the cab after her, exiting towards the side walk, wearing a dark grey suit and an easy smile. The cab is blocking Mordred’s line of sight to him partially,. The woman walks around the cab just as the young man leans down to say something to the driver before straightening up, his head coming just right into the middle of Mordred’s crosshair.

His finger tightens around the trigger and-

He can’t do it. He knows that he can’t do it. No matter how much he wills himself to, he can’t make himself take the shot. Down the street the young man laughs at something the woman said, unaware of the bullet that is just waiting to lodge itself into his head.

The moment stretches and he knows he has to, he has to take the shot, it’s now or never, any second now whoever is watching will notice that his hesitation is lasting just the tiniest bit too long to be just for taking aim and making sure he will hit the mark, and then he will be back to endless hours and days filled with agony and screaming and-

The woman turns and spots him. He can see her lips forming the word sniper, her hand reaching for her companion.

He pulls the trigger, but he already knows before that it’s too late. The woman pushes the young man down and behind the cab, and the bullet hits the window of the restaurant behind them, glass shattering with a crash.

“Retreat!” the person in his earpiece bellows, but he is already up and disassembling the rifle before sprinting towards the fire escape.

 

The facility room is buzzing like a poked hornet’s nest when he comes back, people in lab coats and business suits darting around. The woman is there too, an expression of cold rage on her face. He flinches when she turns to look at him, and debates to run, but he knows that he won’t get far and it would only make his punishment more severe.

The woman takes out her phone and pushes a button.

The viola case drops from his numb fingers and then his vision goes white as pain flashes through his entire body, paralysing him, making him unable to even do so much as whimper, his whole consciousness consumed by agony and he’d do anything to make it stop, god please just make it stop-

When he comes back to himself he is laying on the floor, curled in on himself, his breathing harsh and fast and for a few moments it's the only thing he can do.

“-least the pain response is working,” he can hear the woman say.

“Actually, judging from the footage the implementing was a success,” another voice, male, says. “He did take the shot – we just didn’t account for Lancelot to be accompanying Galahad.”

“This still sets us back a lot,” the woman says, though despite her anger he can still hear a hint of satisfaction in her voice. “I had to burn one of my remaining precious few contacts at Kingsman for this intel; too bad for him that he left out an important detail.”

Slowly he dares to open his eyes, uncurling from his position. The clicking of heels on the floor and then the woman is looking down on him.

“Stand up Mordred,” she orders, and he does, even though his legs feel like they might give out from under him at any moment. “You have another assignment.”

 

They give him a mask – smooth black fabric, which doesn’t hinder his breathing but obscures his voice, covering the lower half of his face. He wonders why they bother with hiding his identity now, wonders who the man he has to kill is and why it has become a necessity. Not that he dares to voice these questions. The rest of the equipment includes a gun with a silencer, and a sword.

The man – or rather the informant, as he has concluded by now – is currently staying at a motel, waiting to be picked up. Slipping in is laughably easy, just a few CCTV cameras to dodge and then he is scaling the back of the building, up to the third floor, gun in his pocket and the sheath with the sword slung over his back. There’s light burning in the man’s room, despite the late hour, and when he heaves himself up enough to look through the window he can see him, pacing impatiently, his white dress shirt and dark pants rumpled and the brown hair on his head a mess, as if he has been threading his fingers through it a few times too often.

Unlike the previous job there is no need for finesse. Mordred smashes in the window and is already climbing into the room before the man has even made his move. He manages to gather himself though, and darts for the night stand, where his gun is lying. Mordred draws his gun and shoots and the man screams, clutching his now bleeding forearm.

He crosses the distance between them in a few strides. The man tries to fight him and while he has obviously been trained, Mordred has been trained better. He has him pinned against the wall a few seconds later.

The sword doesn’t make a sound as he unsheathes it, but the man sobs, tears running down his face as he begs and pleads. Mordred covers his mouth with one gloved hand and then shoves the sword into his stomach, pinning the man to the wall like a butterfly.

It takes him fourteen minutes and eight seconds to die. Mordred counts them, hoping that each one will be the last. The organization had been very specific that the informant’s death should be a slow and painful one – a message to anyone who dared to fail them. Still, his own stomach churns as he watches the man die in agony, the acid from his stomach slowly spreading through his body and killing him from the inside.

In between he wonders what the man would say should he take off his mask. If he would recognize him. If he would know his name, know whoever he used to be. It’s just a fantasy though – even if the man were to know him and would tell him, the organization would just wipe his memories again, the lens in his eye and the tracker he knows they embedded into his left leg making sure that they know his every move, making any attempt to run futile.

Finally the man gasps for the last time and his eyes go blank. Mordred can’t help but envy him a little.

 

The organization gives him his own flat after this. If he is trailed it’s better he doesn’t lead his pursuers right back to them, they say. And it’s not like they are giving him more leeway with it, not with the things they have put into his body, and the suspiciously familiar and also new neighbour just across the hall. His chains and leash may not be visible to the eye but he can feel their weight all the same.

The flat is tiny and there is mould creeping over the ceiling, but at least the formerly bright wallpaper is stained yellow and not white like the walls in the facility.

At night he lies in his bed and listens to the quiet scurrying of tiny rat paws exploring his room.

At day he kills people.

It’s mostly busy work. Often they are criminals or persons with other questionable jobs, who have simply gotten caught up in a bigger web. People who are no longer of use to the organization. People who poke their noses into stuff they shouldn’t be poking their noses into. No one who will really be missed and more importantly, no one whose death would overly alert the local authorities.

He watches them bleed and cry and die, their eyes full of rage and grief and fear and acceptance and wishes he could make himself feel a thing. Surely he should be bothered by the blood that was dripping from his hands, sometimes literally depending on his assignment. Instead he feels nothing, like he is just a puppet, controlled by invisible strings that other people’s hands are pulling.

There was only one time where he had been in control himself. Now already weeks behind him he still remembers it clearly, the hesitation, the fighting and the fear, all because of one man and one woman. Galahad and Lancelot. The knight with the pure heart and the kingdom’s best fighter, according to legend. He keeps wondering about them, whenever he can’t sleep. Had he known them before? He does know that they aren’t civilians, not with the way they moved and reacted.

If he were free to go where he wanted searching for them would be the first thing he’d do, but alas, in his current situation freedom is the one thing he doesn’t have. So he keeps following his orders, slaughters men and women and comes home to listen to the pattering of the rat’s feet mocking him as they dart freely around his room and outside into the world.

He just starts to think that the organization is content to leave him in this daily grind when he is called into the facility.

 

It’s a big conference, London’s wealthiest and most influential men and women gathering and pretending to enjoy themselves while they watch the other’s steps like hawks. The mission is bigger than his previous and vastly more difficult in comparison. The windows of the building are made of bullet proof glass and everywhere security is swarming, not to mention the bodyguards everyone with enough money to their name keeps close to them. Still, security men and women fall easily enough under his knife and gun and one can make a small, unnoticeable hole, enough for a bullet to pass through, into bullet proof glass when one has the necessary equipment.

One moment his target is chatting pleasantly with an elderly woman, his fake smile quite convincing, the next his head explodes in a spray of blood. The alarm starts blaring mere seconds later, drowning the panicked screams of the people below, but Mordred is already away from the roof’s edge, sprinting and jumping over to the next house’s rooftop. The streets are probably already flooded with guards searching for him, but he can make his escape like this, all he needs to do is reach the black Sedan parked a few blocks away from his current position.

He’s nearly there, just at the flat top of the last house when a man and a woman climb over the edge just at the opposite side to him, the one he needs to climb down in order to make his escape.

Both parties have their weapons drawn as soon as they lay eyes on each other and it’s only after he points his gun as them that Mordred recognizes them as Galahad and Lancelot. They are both wearing the same glasses, but different suits, though they are not any less bespoke and obviously expensive as those they had been wearing when he saw them for the first time. They don’t recognize him, of course, mask and cowl obscuring his face well enough.

Lancelot’s expression is professional and determined and Mordred has no doubt that she will take the shot the moment he gives her the opportunity to, but next to her Galahad is wearing an easy grin, the relaxation in his mimic only betrayed by the excellent posture with which he holds his gun trained on Mordred’s head.

“Nice shot!” he calls over, his voice jovial, words coloured with the faintest edge of a rough accent someone probably tried very hard to train him to hide. “I mean, still sorta not cool to kill people, a bit rude that thing, but otherwise good marksmanship.” He exaggeratedly winks at Mordred, who tries to determine whether his behaviour is honest. The whole spiel screams Good Cop Bad Cop so obviously that he can’t help but wonder if it isn’t actually real. If Galahad’s goal was to confuse him, Mordred has to admit that he succeeded.

“Sooo,” Galahad drails. “It would be really kind of you if you’d just drop your gun and agree to come with us peacefully, tell us the name of your employer, and agree to in general stop killing people. And in return we don’t kill you. How’s that sound?”

Mordred debates telling the man that he can’t tell him the name of his employer since he doesn’t know it himself.

Galahad sighs in disappointment when Mordred keeps silent. “Too bad then. But I tried,” he says, and shoots him.

Mordred darts to the side in the last moment, the bullet missing him by millimetres. Before anymore bullets can be aimed at him he pulls the trigger on the smoke bomb he had been holding.

The whole rooftop is befogged before his enemies can do as much as blink, while Mordred sprints towards the edge.

He’s nearly there when something heavy rams into his side. He barely has time to register that it’s another person before he’s falling. He tries to break his fall, but whoever is on him is heavy and grabbing for his arms to restrain him so he hits the concrete ground hard. Rolling with the fall as good as he can he manages to get one leg between him and his assailant, dealing out a strong kick into his solar plexus. There’s a definitely male sounding ‘Oof’ – Galahad then – and Mordred grabs the man’s shoulder and shoves him off. The smoke is already thinning out, but the edge is right there and he swings over it before either Galahad or Lancelot can grab hold off him. He lets himself fall, landing on a balcony below him just a bit too hard but doesn’t pay any mind to the pain, instead swinging over the railing, from there on to a gutter and sliding down until his feet touch the ground and then he’s running out of the alley and to the waiting car.

Out of its tinted window he can see Lancelot and Galahad standing on the edge of the roof as the smoke lifts, and then the car turns a corner and they are out of sight. Still, Mordred keeps looking out of the window, firmly keeping his eyes and the camera installed in one of them away from the small device in his hand on which a small blinking red dot telling him the location of the tracker he pinned on Galahad’s shoulder.


	3. Chapter 3

The woman is upset at the interference by Galahad and Lancelot, but pleased by Mordred’s work which means that she doesn’t punish him and at that moment that is all he cares about. A cab brings him to his flat which he is grateful for as his foot has started to hurt in earnest once the adrenaline wore off. Most likely it is just a sprain in his ankle, but it still makes walking for extended time periods painful. It puts a damper on his plans, but he can be patient, he will have to be.

So all he does for the remainder of the day is go through his training routine as well as he can without putting too much strain on his foot and then showering to get the remaining smell of the smoke bomb out of his hair. Then he starts planning.

In the end the preparations take longer than he had hoped. The tracker dies after the first week – not entirely unexpected as its main purpose was to remain undetectable, not indestructible. But seven days are more than enough to note down all locations Galahad frequents, most notable the one he returns to at night which hopefully is his permanent residence.

The organization still doesn’t allow him outside by himself when he isn’t on a mission; their mistrust is understandable, especially considering what he is now working on, but also the main reason for his very slow progress. He gets his food and any other articles he might need such as soap or toothpaste via his not-so-civilian-neighbour who always brings him the same things every three days like clockwork. He can hardly ask him to get him something else without arousing suspicion, so everything he needs he has to acquire while he is on a mission and without letting the camera catch it. It’s very risky – one slip up and they’ll use the chip in his head to wipe him again and everything he has achieved until then is lost. Not to mention that his punishment would be most… unpleasant.

But he makes progress. He shoots a woman in the head on a mission and as he leans down to check the body slides off the golden ring from her finger. He foregoes sleep for a few nights and memorises the pattern on which his neighbour turned jailor checks in on him. During his visits in the facility and their labs he manages to pocket three of the salts he needs, potassium chloride, sodium chloride and sodium phosphate. He slits the throat of a doctor at a hospital and slides a few packed scalpels into his pocket on his way out.

The only good thing that comes out of having to wait is that he can start collecting the bits and pieces he does remember. It’s not much and none if makes sense – sometimes he wakes up from dreams he cannot recall except for one small detail or two, like the name of a particular tea sort (Darjeeling oolong) or the pattern of a Scottish kilt (distinct green tones with accents in blue). Still, he writes it all down, either deep in the night or early in the morning with merely one eye open, like he’s trying to collect puzzle pieces.

Sadly, none of them fit together. Days turn into weeks and he doesn’t get any closer to actually and consciously regaining even a single memory from his previous life. If only he could take the chip they had implanted into his head out – but his programming prevents him from actively harming himself. All he can do is keep on working. He smelts and flattens the gold ring down to a sheet, just large enough to cover the makeshift eyepatch he has made out of a bit of fabric from one of his shirts. He steals a narcotic and a scale from a drug lord he drowned in his own bath tub and carefully measures the different salts he stole plus ordinary salt he finds in the kitchen in the right quantities, before dissolving them in 37°C water. Out of a box, a toothpick and a pen he builds a trap, puts a bit of food into it and waits until he catches one of the rats that have been scouring his apartment.

Finally, after weeks of preparation, he has everything he needs. The night he chooses is one where he has spent the previous day merely scouring out the premises of the next assassination. No strenuous activities that would affect what he is about to do.

His friendly neighbour checks in at 2AM. He knows that he’s someone who falls asleep quickly, so he merely waits fifteen minutes until he sits up from the bed he pretended to be sleeping in and secures the eyepatch over his right eye. The fabric blocks any light and the gold layer blocks the infrared light, on the off chance that someone at the facility should try switching between the functions when he is supposed to be asleep.

Rolling up the sleeve of his shirt he takes out a scalpel, the water-based salt solution and the rat he has been keeping and feeding in its box. With the scalpel he makes a clean cut where the tracker is embedded in his arm, digging the small piece out and dropping it into the solution. The ion concentrations in it are the exact same as those of human blood – he merely hopes that the tracker isn’t also sensitive to his heart rate and blood pressure, because in that case he is fucked no matter what he does, as the rat’s heart rate will be a lot higher than those of any sleeping humans, even if sedated. He implants the tracker in the rat’s hind leg after giving the animal the narcotic. Hopefully its body will be enough to fool the tracker’s system.

So far no one has come knocking down his door, not even his neighbour, so he hopes that he’s good for now. He straps on his gear, fixing the mask and cowl in place to obscure his face, and then he’s out of the window and into the night.

 

His target, Galahad’s house, is half an hour of walking away from his location. His friendly neighbour will check in again in three hours, which leaves him with two hours to get into Galahad’s house. He could save time by stealing a car or taking a taxi, but he doesn’t have any money and also doesn’t want to arouse any suspicion by stealing something, so walking it is. A few drunkards shout obscenities at him when he passes by them, but otherwise there are no incidents and soon he has arrived.

The house looks normal. White painted façade, large windows with curtains, an obviously cared for little garden in the front with flowers. An idyllic picture, if it weren’t for the small, steadily turning cameras and laser-based motion sensors. He would very much like to rely on his lens right now, but sadly that’s not an option, so he has to make do. It takes him a painstaking amount of time to figure out the pattern and vision fields of the camera and even more time to slip past them until he ends up in a small blind spot at the left side of the house. He scales the wall when the cameras are turned away from him. All the windows have a sensor in front of them he notices in frustration and climbs past the undoubtedly rigged window sills. However, upon closer inspection of the sensors it seems they only work as a line, not as a whole field. Which means that he can slip past them, as long as he comes from above and is very agile. The line bisects the space before the window at about one third from the ground up, so he anchors his feet at the wall above the window and lets himself fall, so he is dangling upside down, with his hands free to work. With a small laser cutter he cuts out a rectangle of the window, large enough for him to fit through. He carefully takes the glass rectangle out, setting it on the window bench inside the room, before swinging himself through the opening, landing softly on the room’s carpet without a sound.

The room is dark, the only light coming from outside, but his eyes have already adjusted enough to the darkness. It appears to be a bedroom, with a big closet, a shelf filled with a few books and framed pictures, and a bed. An occupied bed. He shuffles closer, taking in the bit of the face he can recognize, framed by long, bleached blonde hair. A woman, somewhere in her forties and fast asleep. Definitely not Galahad, though they bear a certain resemblance. Probably his mother then.

He hears a small sound and whirls around, hand reaching for the gun at his side. At the end of the bed, its body hidden amidst the blanket, is a small dog, a pug he thinks, looking at him curiously. The pug doesn’t make a sound, just sniffs and stares as Mordred stares back and tries to slowly reach for the gun with the stun darts as inconspicuously as possible.

Suddenly the dog barks, and Mordred winces – there goes his sneaking in quietly, but before he can silence the animal it has already jumped out of the bed. However, instead of attacking him it starts excitedly jumping and running before and around him, its tail wagging, making no threatening growls, but happy barks.

He is so stunned by the unusual display the small creature makes that he too late notices the woman in the bed waking up.

“JB, what are you doing?” he can hear her ask, speech slurred a bit by sleepiness, before she turns to look at Mordred. He can see the soft confusion in her face shift to panic and she opens her mouth to scream.

The sleeping dart embeds itself in the soft flesh above her collar bone and she falls back down on the bed. At his feet the dog looks up at him in confusion. Mordred doesn’t want to find out if the dog will now recognize him as the threat he is. One pulled trigger later the pug is quiet, only its small ribcage rising and sinking.

He hears footsteps and switches back to his two guns, just in time when the door opens. Light from the hallway falls into the room, outlining the silhouette of Galahad in blue pyjamas, the supposedly soft look sharply contrasted with the gun he has trained on Mordred. On the upside, Mordred has two guns. On the downside he still doesn’t think he could shoot either of them at the other man. Hopefully he doesn’t know that. Still, he makes sure to keep to the shadows where the light doesn’t fall, the darkness, the cowl and the mask leaving nothing of his face visible.

“The fuck did you do to me mum?” Galahad growls and Mordred would put his hands up in a placating gesture if he wasn’t very sure that Galahad wouldn’t hesitate to take the shot the moment he’d do so.

“She’s sleeping,” he answers, his voice muffled by the masks. “Same for your dog.”

He can see Galahad’s gaze shift slightly to check and there’s the barest hint of relief when he takes in the small fall and rise of his mother’s chest. Sadly he doesn’t drop the gun.

“Who the fuck are you?” Galahad says.

I was sort of hoping you would tell me, Mordred thinks. For a moment he is tempted to just drop his weapons and pull down his mask, just to see if the other man would recognize him. But then he has no guarantee that Galahad can be trusted. That he won’t put a bullet in his brain, or worse, drag him to whoever he’s working for and make use of him in the same way the organization is doing now.

“I just want to talk to you,” he says in lieu of answering Galahad’s question.

“Well, I don’t talk to assholes who break into ma house and harm my family,” Galahad sneers. “How ‘bout ya try the door next time?”

“I’m afraid that wasn’t possible,” Mordred says.

“Tough luck then. Now get the fuck out of here.”

“If you would just-“

“No, I won’t just,” Galahad says flatly. “Get. Out.”

Mordred lets out a sigh and aims one of his guns at the woman’s head. Even with the dim light he can see Galahad pale.

“You bloody wanker,” the man grits out between clenched teeth.

“Listen to me, and I won’t have to hurt her,” Mordred says.

“Fine,” Galahad says, barely disguised contempt in his voice. “Say your bloody piece then.”

“Who do you work for?”

Galahad’s face is blank and the silence stretches between them, until the other man raises an eyebrow. “You don’t expect me to actually answer that question, right?”

No, he didn’t, but Galahad’s refusal to answer already tells him quite a lot.

“Who is Merlin?”

Galahad gives a small twitch at that, just the barest movement in right leg. Still, he doesn’t answer, or at least not verbally.

“Who trained you?”

“Who is Lancelot?”

“What blend of tea do you drink?”

Galahad stares at him, incredulous, for once breaking out of his poker face. “You’re taking the piss, right?”

“Answer the question.”

Galahad grins at that, as if he knows that Mordred is getting increasingly frustrated with him. “Nah mate. Don’t think me drinking habits are any of your business.”

Mordred wants to surge forward and shake the man. Do something, he thinks. Say something, anything that will reveal why I can’t shoot you, why you seem so damn important, why I keep running in circles when I try to find out who I am.

All Galahad does is continue to look at him with that smug grin on his face. Time is slipping through Mordred’s fingers, and with it his only hope of finding out who he is. He will have to make a decision.

“Tomorrow at 1300 there will be an attempt on the life of the current leader of the labour party, the woman who is currently running for prime minister,” he says. “She will be giving a speech in public and someone will try to shoot her with a poisonous dart.”

Galahad looks at him, calculating. “Why are you telling me this?” he finally asks.

So I don’t have to bathe my hands in blood once more, he doesn’t say. Galahad doesn’t know that he and the assassin who has been going on a killing spree lately are the same. So Mordred keeps quiet, just walks backwards, both guns still trained at their individual targets, until he is with the back to the window he had climbed in through. Without looking he takes his aim off of Galahad’s mother and shoots the remnants of the window behind him.

“Goodbye Galahad,” he says and lets himself fall out of the window. The alarm starts blaring when he interrupts the laser sensors, but by then he’s already running around the house and ducking into the shadows.


	4. Chapter 4

It takes him nearly an hour to get back, as he backtracks and walks several detours to be sure that he isn’t being tailed. Once he is back in his apartment he re-opens the cut in his arm and transplants the tracker. Using crème and concealer he tries to obscure the cut as well as he can and hopes no one will ask him to roll up his sleeves in the future. And even if that happens, that they won’t dab at the concealer. It had taken him eternities of stealing make-up out of light-skinned women’s bags to get the right shade.

He takes the eyepatch off, hides it between the night stand and the wall and then lies down to sleep. He manages to fall asleep only thanks to his training, but still his agitated mind and the short duration of the resting phase prevent him from not feeling tired when he wakes up in the morning.

He packs his gear, putting the earpiece in and carefully pocketing the dart with the poison and the gun he will use to shoot it, a small thing easily fitting into the wide sleeves of the dark jacket he will be wearing. He pulls the cowl of it deep in his face and winds a thick scarf around his neck to at least hide the lower part of his face. The look is finished by a large pair of sunglasses, which honestly just look dreadful in his opinion, but it’s not as if he can express a complaint of the styling of his outfit towards his superiors.

The speech Mrs Seraf will be giving is open for all public and quite a crowd is expected to gather. It will be held in front of the town hall _._ The place is wide and open, quite perfect for a sniper really, but following the events of V-Day people have become a lot warier, which is why there is also going to be a lot of security, so he is instead going to use the cover of the crowd. The poison is a relatively slow acting one, supposed to give him enough time to flee from the scene of the crime, but not enough for help to arrive in time.

A bit of a drizzle is falling when he steps outsides – quite the disadvantage, since it will make him wearing sunglasses a lot more suspicious. Still, there is no command given from the ear piece that he should change his disguise, so he continues his foot march towards his goal.

He wonders if Galahad is going to come. The man has every reason to believe that he might be leading him into a trap, or that the whole thing is just a diversion for something else. He supposes in the end it all depends on whether the organization that backs him has enough resources. Still, he can’t help but hope that he will be there.

He arrives just when the speech begins, keeping his head down when he passes the security lining the sides of the area where the public is supposed to gather. From what he can tell, Mrs Seraf is quite the good speaker. He doesn’t know anything about the current affair of politics – after all it’s nothing a killing machine has to bother itself with – but from what she is saying, and more importantly how she is saying it, her chances at actually going to become prime minister don’t seem too bad. If she doesn’t die before, that is.

He scans the crowd while he moves into position, trying to make it appear as if he is just looking out for any security walking in between the civilians while he is keeping the eye out for a familiar head with blonde hair cut in a side parting. He doesn’t find one during his brief sweep, though for a moment he thinks he sees a ponytail of brown hair like Lancelot wore when they last met. It might just be wishful thinking though. Still, he doesn’t dare to turn his head and by extension the camera into that direction again, just in case.

Much too soon he is in position. Shooting with the gun in his sleeve will require a bit of an odd angle, since he can’t take aim without drawing suspicion to himself, but the lens in his eye will do the targeting for him. All he has to do is make sure that he doesn’t accidentally hit any bystanders who might move into the way of the dart.

Shifting a bit while simultaneously making sure that the gun stayed hidden he changes the angle so that the red line marking the path of the dart ended in Mrs Seraf’s left arm. The initial wound shouldn’t hurt much, so if he is lucky it shouldn’t be detected until the poison starts to do its work.

He breathes in, gripping the gun and putting his finger on the trigger, lifting it slightly so that there are no obstacles for the path. Any second now he is going to hear the command to take the shot.

“Stop that man!” he hears a female voice yell and he whirls around to see a familiar petite figure cut her way through the masses with a lot of elbow-usage. He feels faintly pleased, even as he hears the woman in his earpiece yell “Take the shot, Mordred!”

He turns around without his own accord, lifting his arm in one fluid motion and pulling the trigger. But the security, thanks to Lancelot’s interference, has already been notified to the threat and one of them pulls Mrs Seraf to the side and down just as he shoots. The dart embeds itself into the concrete wall just where her chest used to be.

He doesn’t have time to try again, instead he starts running, hearing Lancelot behind him as she pushes her way through the crowd behind him. Right now, the crowd works to his advantage – people are too shocked to try and stop him, but at the same time they serve as a shield against Lancelot, apparently preventing her from plain shooting him in the back out of fear of hitting a civilian.

However, very soon he’s at the edge of the crowd. The security men and women have still not fully gathered themselves, but they have already formed a line just where he is coming through, trying to block him off. They haven’t drawn their guns though, apparently not classifying him as a threat they need to kill, which is quite the miscalculation on their part.

He breaks into a full out sprint, now that the crowd has thinned out, holding directly towards the line. At the last moment, just as he is nearly upon them and their hands are already reaching out to grab him and stop him from barrelling into their line, he jumps, high enough to land with one foot on the shoulder of a stunned security man, and uses it as spring board to get over the line. He hits the ground running, while the security personal is still turning around and trying to comprehend where he went. Behind him he can hear Lancelot yell at them to let her through but he doesn’t waste precious bits of his head start to turn around and check if she was delayed by them. He dashes into one of the back alleys that lead to a bigger plaza, one full of pedestrians all busy and focussed on being somewhere else and he might just be able to lose his pursuers amidst them.

He reaches the plaza and disappears into the crowd, forcing himself to slow his pace. He nicks a cap from a passing young man whose dressing choices suggest that he went terribly wrong somewhere in his life, and pulls down the hood of his jacket to put the atrocious headwear on. At this point, it’s mostly hoping for luck that Lancelot won’t spot him; he can’t turn around, lest he give himself away. So he merely keeps with the flow of the crowd, until he comes to one of the bigger streets where he hails a cab.

In the end it takes him nearly an hour to make sure that he’s lost Lancelot and then to return to the facility. The woman is very displeased, and she makes very sure that he knows it. He is glad that she doesn’t know that it was him who tipped Galahad’s organization off – he hopes that she never finds out. Even by the time he reaches his apartment he can still feel the aftershocks of the pain wracking through his body. He knows he should be regretting his decision to tell Galahad about the assassination attempt – he surely didn’t gain anything from it. Still he can’t bring himself to.

He comes home, toes off his shoes and falls into his bed, his tortured body grateful that the strain of moving and standing upright is taken off of it. He pretends to fall asleep like this, his eyes closing and then he blindly reaches for the hidden eyepatch and slips it on. From under the mattress he retrieves the notebook, flipping it to an empty page and starts drawing, a female face with a small round chin, full lips, dark hair neatly pulled back and in the middle determined dark eyes. ‘Lancelot’ he writes underneath, and then flips to the next page.

Drawing Galahad seems both easier and harder at the same time, his face better etched into Mordred’s memory, but by the time he is finished he can’t help but feel frustrated at what he is drawn, even though the sketched face looking back at him is exactly like the one he remembers. After a moment he erases the mouth pressed into a thin line and instead draws it stretched into a grin, showing a hint of white teeth and a bit crooked in a cheeky way. He fusses a bit more over the rest of the face, erasing the frown he had previously drawn and adding a bit of a crinkle to the eyes.

Once he’s finished there doesn’t seem so much of the Galahad he knows left, the serious man replaced by someone friendlier and kinder and looking down at his work Mordred can feel warmth spreading through his chest as this new person smiles back at him from the page.

He angrily snaps the notebook shut a moment later. It isn’t real what he has drawn, he forcibly reminds himself. Has he truly become so desperate for a kind touch that he will seek it even from his enemy? Empathy and sympathy, as the people at the facility have reminded him so often, are two things he doesn’t need and shouldn’t have. A part of him knows that. Still, right now that part isn’t strong enough that it can make him tear out and destroy that drawing as he should.

So instead he hides the book and the eyepatch again and settles down to actually sleep before anyone decides to check up on him and find him awake.

 

Meeting Galahad again is more difficult. The next time he manages to get away from his flat/cell the security around Galahad’s house has been visibly upgraded. More cameras, more sensors, even one not so subtle security man in civil clothes. It doesn’t really come as a surprise, especially with how angry Galahad had seemed when he had threatened his family. Still, for Mordred it is most inconvenient, as he has to resign to lurking around the house, unable to even see Galahad. All he achieves that way is losing sleep and risking to get caught.

However, his next assignment is coming closer and closer and he doesn’t think he can go back to killing like he used to. But he also cannot risk capture to relay the information to Galahad, so in the end he decides to take the – less private and more insecure – route over third parties. He cuts letters and words out of newspapers he fishes out of trashcans and uses them to spell out date, location and name of the next target. After a bit of consideration he adds the line ‘I would still like to know your preferred blend of tea’ and then signs with the letter ‘F’, hoping that Galahad will recognize whom the message is from.

Getting the message to Galahad isn’t quite possible for him, not with the heavy watch the house is under. He doesn’t really have the time to lose any trails they might put on him should he try to shove something into Galahad’s mailbox, not when he still wants to be back in time for his friendly neighbour to check in.

So the next time he is let out he steals the wallet of someone in an expensive enough suit and at night uses the money to bribe a few people to transport three copies of the letters to Galahad. He hopes at least one of those actually arrives, even though he tried his best menacing impression when he threatened the chosen messengers with bodily harm should they think of merely pocketing the money and throwing the paper in the trash.

The next day he does find out that he didn’t hope in vain. He also finds out that Lancelot is very skilled in using silver cutlery as makeshift weapons and only narrowly avoids being disembowelled with a fork. The woman is still displeased when he returns, but at least seems to think that there is no use in punishing him as he didn’t even get the chance to come near to his target this time before Lancelot intervened.

He uses the same strategy the next time an assignment comes up, and the one after that and the one after that. It’s walking a dangerously thin line, and he knows it. There are already whispers about a traitor in the facility by the time the third assassination is foiled. It is only a matter of time before someone finds him out if he keeps this up, but still he can’t bring himself to stop writing those little letters.

The feeling of for once being in control is addicting. He cannot go against the orders he gets – his programming prevents him from directly disobeying his superiors and even if he would manage to do so, they would just tear his mind down and built him up as the perfect killing machine he used to be.

His current tactic isn’t perfect of course – aside from being discovered as the information leak he also has to work against Galahad’s organization and make sure the people they send to stop him don’t end up killing, or worse, capturing him. As well as he manages to appear as emotionless and unsuspicious to the outside as always, inside he is constantly expecting someone to find him out.

So it isn’t much of a surprise that his first reaction when he hears the rumours is panic. He had been loitering around in one of London’s lesser renowned areas, hoping to spot someone who seemed desperate enough for a bit of money while still not being under the influence of too many drugs, when he hears Galahad’s name being whispered.

He whirls around, hand already going to the gun hidden in his coat, but he only spots two prostitutes, leaning against the back wall of a brothel, sharing a cigarette, lips occasionally moving to exchange words.

“Excuse me,” he says as he walks up to them. The two women visibly startle, the older one’s hand gripping against her thigh were his trained eyes can make out the faint outline of a knife sheath. Smart woman.

“May I have a moment?” he asks, stopping at a polite distance to not seem overly threatening. This isn’t the time to get involved into a street brawl.

The two women share a glance, visibly taking in his attire and how he obscures his face; then the older one speaks, her voice husky from cigarette smoke: “We’re off work right now sweetie, how about you walk around to the front and find yourself a nice girl there?”

“I am not interested in your bodily services,” he replies. “I only want to hear what you know about someone named Galahad.”

Another moment of silent communication between them, then the younger one says: “Who says we know anything about him?”

He pulls out the stolen wallet, dragging out one of the billets in it just enough so the two women can make out the edge of the fifty pounds note.

The younger one turns to eagerly look at the older who appears to be a bit more cautious than her colleague, visibly weighing risk and gain.

“Each,” she says after a moment and Mordred grits his teeth and pulls out another fifty pounds, handing both over.

The women pocket the money in the side of their bras with a twin satisfied grin and take another moment to take a drag from the cigarette.

Before Mordred can get too impatient, the older one opens her mouth. “There’s a rumour on the street that has it a certain Galahad is waiting on Jameson’s road, wanting to talk to the author of his love letters. And that he’s willing to wait there each day after the sunsets, for as long as he needs to.”

“Quite romantic,” the other women says as she winks at him. “Though the love bit of letter might just be added by the people we heard it from.”

He nods and walks away without another word, the women behind him giggling. The new information has his head spinning. It is quite obvious that Galahad wants a meeting, and it is at least on semi-neutral ground, but that gives him no guarantee that it isn’t just a trap. Curiosity killed the cat, he thinks darkly and pushes the thought of it out of his head in favour of finding the next bringer for his one remaining letter.


	5. Chapter 5

He lasts a full three days until he finds himself on Jameson’s road, or at least on one of the rooftops from which the street can be observed. It’s a narrow one, nestled between abandoned houses, with garbage bag lining its sides and even from his vantage point he can imagine the stink of piss down in it.

He doesn’t really know why he’s here – maybe it is time to admit to himself that he has an unhealthy obsession with Galahad which will probably be the cause of his death in due time. He doesn’t really expect Galahad to actually be there, which is why he is all the more stunned when he sees the familiar figure standing but not quite touch with his back to one of the house walls, his formal attire very much out of place in those surroundings, a plain navy suit with a burgundy tie and a medal pinned on his chest, thick-rimmed spectacles adorning his face.

He spends the entire time he has that night to search for the trap. For cameras, any other persons loitering around who might not be as civilian as they pretend to be, any hidden weapons set up to be activated and harm him the moment he steps into the alley.

Galahad leaves after an hour of waiting, probably to do the sensible thing and catch some sleep, but even without his presence Mordred cannot find the trap. There is just nothing. Either whatever they have up their sleeve is hidden very, very well, in which case he has to feel a grudging amount of respect to whomever is in charge of Galahad’s technical support, or there simply is no trap. As he gets more and more thorough with his swipes he has to admit that in all likelihood, option 2 seems to be true after all. A conclusion he doesn’t really know how to deal with. Galahad may not know that he is the assassin, but that doesn’t mean that he will have forgotten that Mordred threatened his family. Plus no matter how obsessed he is with the man, he is not foolish enough to believe that he has no ulterior hidden motive for seemingly wasting his time by waiting for him to come. Trust in another person’s inner goodness is something Mordred has lost a long time ago, and objectively thinking about the problem he has to admit that trusting Galahad is one of the last things he should be doing.

That doesn’t help against the feeling he just cannot shake off, which tells him that he should do exactly that. Which would be the equivalent to wilfully committing suicide. Maybe he should not be debating so much with reason, seeing that his current status as living being is mostly that of an amnesiac and manipulated killer.

He decides that it’s enough after the fourth night of watching Galahad wait and leave. All he is doing is waiting his time if he never stays away but also never approaches him. Also the never fully healing wound on his arm where the tracker is supposed to be is really starting to hurt.

In the end he simply walks into the alley, fake casual posture and his hands at his sides, with Galahad easily seeing him coming. But then he isn’t here to fight. Or at least he hopes so.

“And here I was starting to think you wouldn’t ever show up,” Galahad says in lieu of a greeting. Today he’s wearing a light grey suit, with a blue tie matching his eyes that are once again framed by glasses. The medal Mordred has already seen him wear before is again attached to the chest and not for the first time he wonders what the man got it for.

“Apologies,” he says, the word all politeness and zero honesty, not that he bothers to disguise this fact from Galahad, who somehow seems to find it amusing.

“Well, main thing is that ya here and for once not pointing guns at other people’s heads. Helps with actually having a decent conversation y’know.”

“I’m still not entirely convinced that it might not come to that later.”

Galahad puts up his hands in a placating gesture. “Nah, at least I ain’t planning to pull a gun on ya. I know this all seems a bit… fishy, but you’re actually pretty hard to find and what with how ye were acting I figured ya wouldn’t be up for just meeting in a pub and discussing things over a pint.”

“Indeed,” he says.

“But ya would be up for a bit of talking?” Galahad asks, all feigned innocence.

He inclines his head to indicate that he at least isn’t averse to it.

“Playing hard to get, are we?” Galahad jabs, but he continues: “I wanted to propose an arrangement, on behalf of my organization. A mutually beneficial one.”

“What kind of arrangement?”

“One where you stop with having to do the whole subterfuge thing, instead being assigned a handler who will relay any intel you gather. In return, we will provide you with equipment and protection.”

“I am not sure that is a very good deal,” he said after a moment of consideration.

“You wanted answers to some questions about who I work for, didn’t ya? If you work for them to, you might get them.”

“Still doesn’t mean that I can trust you. Or your organization.”

“Hmm,” Galahad hummed. “A legit concern. How about I give you a show of good faith then? You get to ask one question and I’m gonna answer it, as long as it doesn’t break my confidentiality agreement. So, stuff about me drinking tea would be fine. If ya still want to know that.”

“Maybe I was just asking that to throw you off,” he says.

“Or maybe ya weren’t,” Galahad retorts with a smirk, like he knows exactly that Mordred actually wanted the answer to that stupid question. He begrudgingly has to admire the man’s perceptiveness.

He’s just about to really ask for the man’s tea preferences, and if only to see if it will throw him off, when his eyes once again catch on the medal, twinkling faintly in the dim light of the alley.

“Where did you get that medal?” he asks before he can really think about it.

For a moment Galahad looks as surprised at the question as Mordred himself is. Just as he starts to think that the other man is going to refuse to answer his question, he opens his mouth.

“It was given to me,” he says. “When I was younger. By a- a friend.”

“A friend?” Mordred repeats carefully, not missing the slight catch in the man’s voice at those words.

“He died,” Galahad says flatly, his professional mask slipping back into place, but he has already seen the pain that hides behind it.

Cold-blooded killers don’t express their sympathy, they are not even supposed to have it; for a moment, that doesn’t make him want to do it any less. He feels his training come back to him, and the moment passes. Still, he can’t quite bring himself to look away from the medal. Seeing it from the distance he had thought it showed some sort of diagonal cross, but seeing it this up close he realizes that that’s not true. Instead there’s one line drawn through the middle, and the upper half is again cleaved by two more lines, originating from the middle and going up in a slight arch. It seems a fairly odd choice for a medal as a symbol.

It’s the letter K he realizes a moment later. No, not realize, remember. The headache comes a moment later, strong enough to make him dizzy for a moment as he tries to recall where he has seen the symbol before, desperately trying to reach for the strands of memories he isn’t supposed to have.

“Hey, you okay?” he dimly hears Galahad asking.

“I’m fine,” he grits out. “I have to go.” He staggers back almost without his own accord, the pain and his jumbled thoughts making him disoriented.

“Oi, would’ya wait a sec-“ He can hear Galahad start, but he’s already whirling around and running out of the alley as quickly as he can manage.

Galahad doesn’t follow him. It takes him many streets and a bit of sporadic back-tracking to be sure, and he tells himself that he shouldn’t be this disappointed by it. Still, as he finally arrives in his apartment and lies down to sleep, Galahad’s face and words are still whirling through his mind.

 

 

 

_a high-pitched sound fills the air and under his hand he can feel bones break and he is scared_

_the black hole of a gun muzzle pointed at him and despite all he has been through he doesn’t want to die not when there is still so much to say and he is scared_

_the pain he expects from being shot in the head doesn’t come but he still can’t move as he lies on the cold hard ground can’t fight when hands grip his body and lift him up and carry him away and he is scared_

_he cannot see what they are doing to him cannot move with his head away from the blinding light above him his limbs held tightly in chains but he can feel cold gloved hands as fingers ghost over the patch where his nape meets his head soon to be replaced with knives and saws that cut through skin and muscle and flesh and bone and he is scared scared scared-_

 

He jolts awake, breath coming in gasps and then he is falling and stumbling out of his bed and into the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet bowl before his body is forcing out the contents of his stomach. This late at night it’s mostly stomach acid, burning in his throat, bitter and sour on his tongue. He retches until nothing more comes up and then slumps against the side of the toilet bowl, resting his head on the cool porcelain.

Suddenly a blinking cursor appears in his vision. It takes him a few moments to realize that the small green thing is not in fact floating in his bath room, but rather screened on the lens that is still in his eye.

‘Report to the facility. Look into the mirror and nod once to confirm orders.’

Shaking slightly, he pushes himself up and stumbles to the sink, facing the stained mirror above it. His own reflection stares back at him, eyes bloodshot and hair dishevelled. He nods once and the words disappear from his vision, leaving it deceptively normal once again.

He rinses out his mouth and then gets dressed. A black car is already waiting outside of his apartment as he steps out, one door opened towards him and he gets in, closing it behind him.

There’s a pane of – probably bulletproof – glass between him and the driver, and he can hear the doors lock the moment he closes his. Without a word the person in the front starts driving. Mordred resists the urge to reach for his eye and claw it out. Of course he had known that he was constantly monitored, that one push of the right button could be enough to leave him paralyzed on the floor, but being reminded of it this way was… discomforting to say at least.

No doubt they were bringing him in for an examination. He remembers it still very well from his early days, white walls with people in white coats, smiling fake smiles as they gave him pills that made him fall into dreamless sleeps and numbed his mind.

He desperately tries to cling onto the hope that they won’t wipe him again, won’t take all his memories from him again. Even with his journal, recovering all he had accomplished over the past few weeks would be nigh impossible as they would undoubtedly tighten the surveillance and keep a tighter leash on him.

He had been doing his utmost to avoid this situation, to not give them any hint at how much he was deviating from the mindless puppet he was supposed to be. Often enough he had imagined how he might be found out – maybe his friendly neighbour would try to check his room thoroughly enough to notice the small compartment hidden in the wall behind his bed; or maybe one of the doctors doing a check-up and noticing the angry red cut from where he had taken out the tracker. There were many more of those fictional scenarios, but never had he thought it would happen like this. The irony that it has been his own self who has ratted him out isn’t lost to him.

The streets of London are nearly deserted at this time of the night, so they arrive quickly – too quickly for Mordred’s taste – and the opening of the door next to him is a silent demand for him to get out of the car and into the building. He does, of course, because really, what else is he supposed to do?

A nurse greets him in the entrance hall, asking him to follow as he leads the way through the halls, deeper into the buildings belly, to the laboratories and examination rooms, hidden from the public areas. The nurse stops in front of one of the white doors that look just about the same as all the others in the hallway, its only distinction the number plate to the side of it.

“The doctor is waiting for you,” he says with a smile that is probably supposed to be pleasant, but which makes Mordred’s skin crawl.

He nods, and resists the urge to square his shoulders and take a deep breath – the last thing he needs is to let on exactly how anxious he is. The nurse opens the door and he steps through it, hoping that he will be still be the same person when he walks out of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a comment to feed the author!


	6. Chapter 6

The doctor is a white man in his thirties, with ash blond hair and a teeth gap in his upper front teeth he shows when he greets Mordred with a quite convincing smile. He is sitting on a chair, in front of him a metal table which has been bolted to the floor.

“Please, take a seat,” he says, motioning to the one free chair opposite to him. He sits down, hands coming to rest on his legs, his back straight. The doctor taps his pen once and scribbles something down on his notebook, so Mordred uses the small free moment to take in the room he is in. Three of the walls are painted white, the fourth one is a one-way mirror that only shows his reflection staring back at him. In one of the upper corners a video camera is recording everything that is happening in this room, its lens pointed directly at Mordred.

“So,” the doctor finally says. “How do you feel?”

Mordred considers the question for a moment. “Tired.”

The doctor jots down his answer – or at least Mordred thinks he does; he cannot see what he is writing from this angle.

“Do you know why you are here, Mordred?”

“Because I dreamt.”

“And what makes you come to the conclusion that this is the reason for this examination?”

“When I was still at the facility, dreaming was discouraged.”

“Do you know why?”

“Dreaming is not a necessity for me.”

“We have noticed that you do not seem to be sleeping well as of late. Is that correct from your account?”

“Yes,” he answers. Not quite the truth, but also not a full lie. He has not been sleeping much after all. However, that fact is very much of his own doing.

“Have you dreamt before tonight during your sleep?”

“No.”

“But your sleep has been unrestful?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you not notify your handler of this?”

“It has not been affecting my performance, so I did not see a need for it.”

The doctor takes a moment to write down something in his notebook, but so far he seems mostly satisfied with Mordred’s answers.

“So, tell me, what was your dream about?”

Mordred tilts his head slightly. “I do not remember, mostly. I do remember lying on a flat cold surface, above me a bright light, and I felt fear.”

The doctor is leaning forward in his chair, his interest obviously piqued.

“Do you remember anything else?”

“No. My apologies” Mordred says. He doesn’t dare outright lying to them – they know that something has upset him after all. But maybe he can get away with hiding parts of the truth.

The doctor looks at him for a few very long moments, his stare calculating. Then his lips break into a smile and Mordred feels like he can finally breathe again properly.

“No need to apologize,” the doctor says as he makes a few more notes. Finally he turns towards the mirror and holds up one finger to whomever is standing behind it and watching. “Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I will be right back.” He stands up and leaves the room, the heavy door falling shut with a bang behind him.

Mordred remains sitting, his posture never changing as he waits, as if this was just another sniper job that requires him to not move for extended time periods, instead of him waiting for the decision which might bring the loss of every bit of self he has so painstakingly reclaimed.

With nothing to do, Mordred counts the seconds. At 568, the door opens again and the doctor comes back in, a medicine bottle with pills rattling inside it in his hand.

“Now, we believe that most seems to be in order, but we’d just like to make sure that you are sleeping properly,” he says with a smile as he puts the bottle on the table in front of Mordred. “Take one of the red ones after your missions and before going to sleep and one of the blue ones when you wake up. In front of the mirror, if you please, so we can make sure that you don’t forget to take them.”

The doctor’s smile makes him want to shove the contents of the bottle down his throat and see if he dies from the overdoses. But that would quite ruin his previous efforts, so Mordred just nods obediently and pockets the bottle.

“That would be all then,” the doctor says, walking over to the door and holding it open for Mordred to walk through.

 

Once he’s back at his apartment it’s already early in the morning and too late for catching up on his sleep. Quite detrimental to his plans as he has been having trouble with catching ends on that front anyway, what with his nightly endeavours. So instead he lies on his bed, eyes closed, relaxing without falling asleep in an attempt to give his body and mind at least a bit more of rest.

At 8AM sharp he stands up, grabs the pill bottle from the night stand and walks into the bathroom. When he looks into the mirror, Mordred looks back at him, the ever-composed and lethal assassin, his face devoid of any signs of the turmoil inside him. The blue pill is smooth and small in the palm of his hand, so very unassuming. Still he can’t help but be more afraid of it than he has ever felt during one of his missions when he had to face enemies armed to the teeth.

He swallows the pill. It tastes like nothing but he still has to keep himself from gagging at it, his own body knowing that he is essentially poisoning himself.

Nothing changes. He doesn’t know why he thought it would – after all his body first has to absorb the pill in order for it to work, so he probably won’t feel any of its effects until at least half an hour has passed.

So he washes, dresses, eats and starts with his morning training routine, all the while resisting the urge to put a finger in his mouth and force the pill along with everything else out of his stomach. His friendly neighbour rings, the dossier on his next target wrapped up in the pile of junk mail that comes every morning with the post. He leafs through it after the door shuts. From the photo attached to the information sheet a woman with red hair grins back at him. According to the text she’s the co-owner of a computer chip firma, and lives somewhere near Hampstead Heath. As usual, no further information as to why she has to die, just that he is supposed to let the body disappear.

The information all catalogued and stashed away in his brain he burns the dossier and flushes the remains down the toilet as usual, before he goes and packs his equipment.

Observation is a necessary part of every successful assassination, but it is also very dull. Usually, he uses the time to think on his ‘side-projects’, like trying to piece together the mess of his memories or figuring out his next steps in trying to contact Galahad. Or in general thinking about Galahad.

But today his thoughts seem sluggish, making his mind slow whenever he tries to concentrate on anything but the task at hand. It makes him go through the whole ordeal almost mechanically, wandering from place to place without drawing attention to himself, watching silently. The woman’s flat would be the most obvious choice for an ambush, but she lives in an apartment block which is outfitted with too many security cameras, making the part of letting the body disappear more complicated. There’s her workplace, but she actually seems to be someone who works from 9 to 5, rather taking any additional workload home instead of slaving away in her office alone at night. This only leaves her way from the office back to her flat. So he waits until it’s in the late afternoon, watching her leave the office building with a bulk of other workers. She walks around the building, to where Mordred saw her stash her bicycle this morning. He watches her leave, riding her bike at a leisurely pace down the street, before he looks down at the small screen of his phone, with which he can’t call anyone of course, but which tells him the location of the tracker he planted on her bike. It’s not too far, 20 minutes with the bicycle and an hour to walk. What is most interesting to Mordred is that her route crosses through one of London’s many parks, which is fairly unpopulated during the evening hours. The tracker follows the slightly winding routes through it, across a bridge spanning over a canal, until it finally leaves the park. Mordred watches the point of tracker coming to a halt at the target’s house, where it stays unmoving and blinking.

His work for today done, he turns around and makes his way back to his apartment.

Now that his focus from the mission is wearing off, he notices just how tired he feels. It’s all he can do not to fall face-first into his bed the minute he’s back. He knows that he still needs to send a message about the upcoming assassination to Galahad, but now that his official orders are completed, Mordred finds it hard to care about anything else but getting his mind and body the rest they are demanding.

Still, he keeps his head up and shoulders straight, refusing to let the mental exhaustion show when he looks into the bath mirror. He downs the red pill, followed by a gulp of water. There are no additional orders, so he strips, washes and lies down on his bed.

His limbs and head feel even heavier now that he has taken the drug. He knows he needs to stay awake, needs to contact Galahad, but at this moment, the whole issue seems so pointless to him. What can he even hope to achieve with all of it? The moment Galahad finds out who his informant is really working for he’ll put a bullet in his head, and he can’t even begrudge him for it.

Still, he tries to hold on to his consciousness, but it’s a losing battle, the chemicals in him turning his body against his mind and soon he loses his grip and falls into velvet, dreamless darkness.

 

Mordred wakes up the next morning, feeling less like he actually slept and more like someone has knocked him unconscious. Still he drags himself out of bed and obediently swallows the next pill. It’s too late now to stop the assassination, but the expected pang of dread and guilt doesn’t come. Instead he just feels hollow. What’s one more person’s blood on his hands after all.

Mordred packs his surveillance equipment, a few sharp knives and the standard gun, even though he isn’t expecting to use the latter. All of it hidden somewhere on his body, the last addition is a large backpack slung over his shoulder, containing a timer and a thick coil of rope among other things.

There isn’t much to do save waiting. Mordred watches his target come in to work, resuming her place in one of the office cubicles. For hours he doesn’t move away from his observation spot, doing nothing, thinking nothing, his mind an empty slate. The woman leaves for lunch break and then returns. It’s not until 4pm that he sets to work. At the bottom of the office building is a small door which leads into the server rooms. Locked of course, but not a problem for him. He breaks the lock in the same time it takes some people to properly put their key into it, then pushes the door open. Hallways with concrete walls lit by neon lights lead him to the servers. Mordred pulls out several cables at random – he doesn’t want to cause real structural damage, just a bit of a delay in the work schedule of his target. He’s out before someone from several floors above him even realizes that something is wrong. Walking into the deserted backyard, only populated by trashcans and bicycles, he quickly singles out the vehicle onto which he had attached the tracker. A few quick slices with his knife tear the tyres into rubber ribbons.

When he returns to his spot, he can already see a small commotion forming in the office building. People are running around like a flock of disturbed chickens. Even his target has risen from her seat and seems to be arguing with a man in a suit. Mordred watches time tick by on his watch. The sun sets and the temperature drops as hours pass. It isn’t until 8pm that his target exits the building, face pinched from the stress, then turning into overt frustration when she sees the damage done to her bicycle.

If Mordred were someone else, he would be holding his breath, but as things stand he just continues watching her like a hawk. His target now has three options – number one would be to hail a cab, but London’s traffic can be tricky and she couldn’t hope to make it home in under an hour that way. It would mean that Mordred would have to facilitate a car accident, which is somewhat risky as it is rather difficult to make sure that his target is actually dead and not just severely wounded. Number two would be to take the subway, but the next station is a fairly long walk, as is the distance between the end station and his target’s home. Which leaves option number three – simply to walk.

Mordred watches his target feint a kick at her bicycle before she turns around and starts to walk down the street, following the same route she would take would her bicycle be still intact, as it does also happen to be the shortest one from her place of work to her home. Though today she will not reach the latter if everything goes according to Mordred’s plan.

He leaves his observation spot and starts following her at a safe distance. Not that he really needs to bother – the woman is as much civilian as they come, not even looking through her shoulder as she continues on her way. Still, it can’t hurt to be careful.

By the time they reach the park it’s mostly deserted, empty gravel path way lit by evenly distributed street lights. It makes following his target a bit harder, but it still doesn’t pose much of a challenge. There are enough paths which go nearly parallel to the one his target uses and it’s dark enough that he can easily blend into the trees and bushes if need be.

Mordred closes in on her as she reaches the bridge. She doesn’t hear him, doesn’t notice him until the moment he grabs her from behind, one gloved hand covering her mouth, pushing her against the wooden railing of the bridge. The other hand holds the sharp knife, which slits through her throat as if it were warm butter. Blood splashes from her throat into the canal underneath them, to be immediately carried away by the water. For a few long seconds her body convulses against his, then it goes still.

He drags the corpse off the bridge before anyone can see them, off the path and down to the canal. Using the thick rope he winds a noose around the neck. At the other end of the rope he binds one of the heavy stones he finds at the shore of the canal, plus the balloons and timer he had prepared earlier this morning. The balloons should keep the body afloat in the current, dragging it away and somewhere where no one will search for it, before the timer runs to zero and pricks them.

Once the preparations are done and no living soul is in sight he drags the body up the bridge and drops it in the water. One big splash, then nothing, the black water swallowing the corpse before returning to its deceptively undisturbed and smooth surface.

Mordred returns home, takes the next pill, lies down to sleep and feels nothing as the tears turn his pillow wet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a comment, it would be very much appreciated! :)


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait, lots of real life and less of creative energy, but here is the next chapter (only nearly four months later)!

It’s still dark when he wakes up. He can hear a bit of shuffling, then the sound of the door closing. His friendly neighbour must have just checked in. He carefully opens the eye without the camera to glance at the alarm clock. 5AM. He still feels exhausted, but less tired – the effect of the pills must have mostly worn off. Half-blind he reaches and grabbles for the eye-patch hidden behind his bed and slides it on.

He sits up. His head and jaw ache – he must have been gritting his teeth in his sleep. The pain is dull, but it helps sharpen his thoughts. Which in turn makes him re-focus on the emotional turmoil which seems to be still going strong. His memories of the previous day are still crystal clear, but the haze that had been surrounding his mind yesterday is gone, leaving him with the full awareness of what he has done, the feeling of the dying woman’s body in his arms, the blood splashing from her throat, her dead eyes staring back up at him-

He grips the headboard of the bed as he sways, sudden nausea hitting him low and hard and for a few moments all he can do is try to breathe and not throw up.

He has to get rid of the pills. If that was what taking them for one day did to him he doesn’t even want to imagine the long term effects. Still, getting rid of them is easier said than done – any attempts to palm them or to pocket them under his tongue until he can spit them out again would be noticed without doubt.

Walking into the bathroom, he grabs the pill bottle from where he last deposited above the sink. He opens it and fishes one of the blue pills out, holding it against the light. He didn’t really study them before, too busy in his attempt to swallow them without gagging on the drugs that were effectively poisoning his mind and body. Holding them against the light now he realizes that they are actually tiny capsules. There’s the outer, hard surface, made to dissolve in stomach acid, and inside is the actual drug.

He takes the pill bottle and walks out of the bathroom towards the kitchenette. From his equipment bag he fishes a small knife, its blade not longer than his little finger but very, very sharp. Seeing it reminds him of the other knife still in the bag and by now encrusted in dried blood of the woman he killed yesterday, and he hastily sets to work. Taking the knife he sets the edge right where the capsule had been originally fused together, and slices. The shell parts separate easily and clean, and a clear liquid comes pouring out, spilling over the surface of the kitchenette.

Running the whole thing under the tap, he washes out the liquid, then examines the two halves of the shell. They are about one millimetre thick, the edges clean and fit together again perfectly.

Out of one of the cupboards he grabs a jar of honey, then an egg from the refrigerator and a small bowl. He cracks the egg against the edge of the bowl, making sure to pour only the white of it into the bowl, then discards the egg shell with the yellow. Using a spoon he takes a good portion out of the honey jar, then carefully mixes it into the egg white. Once it has properly dissolved, he takes one of the capsule shells and dips just the edge of it into the mixture, making sure it’s coated all around, before pressing it back against its other half. A bit of the mixture quills out of the gap and he wipes it off carefully, before setting it on a clean part of the kitchenette. Out of the pill bottle comes another blue pill and he holds the two of them next to each other. The honey and egg make sure that the two halves hold together, acting as natural glue. Now that the mixture has dried, there is nearly no difference visible between the opened and the unopened capsule, merely the ring marking the cut between the halves seems a bit more visible in the modified one.

It shouldn’t be enough to notice over the camera – at least he’s certain enough of it to bet on it. He sets the first empty capsule aside and then takes to work on the rest.

By the time the sun is starting to peek over the horizon he has emptied all of the capsules into the sink and then glued them back together. Tired, but satisfied he looks at the refilled pill bottle, before he puts it back into the bathroom. He takes extra care in tidying up the kitchenette, making sure that no one notices that someone has worked on it this night, before climbing back into his bed.

He manages to sleep for the remaining two hours, until his alarm clock wakes him.

The capsule in his mouth tastes sweet, but the feeling of relief is even sweeter.

 

Mordred usually works alone, so it is a bit of a surprise when two days later the woman announces that two men will accompany on his next mission. Apparently it isn’t an assassination this time, but property damage. A store house is supposed to blow – Mordred is supposed to eliminate the security forces, one man guards the perimeter and the other will deal with the explosives, making the explosion look like merely a faulty gas pipe line.

They are cowering in the dark of the night behind several garbage containers near the warehouse. The man responsible for the explosives is small, with a receding hairline and watery eyes. The other man is tall and lean, with a shaven head.

“We are on standby, waiting for the signal,” the bald man says into his micro, and for a moment Mordred is surprised to hear him speak with an American accent, instead of the Scottish brogue he expected.

The signal comes in the form of their handler’s voice giving out a clipped ‘Go’ and they swarm out. The bald and not Scottish man starts climbing up the building, no doubt seeking a high point from where he can eliminate anyone trying to flee with his sniper rifle. Mordred and the man with the explosives go in. The security guards easily fall under Mordred’s guns and fists. They make it to the cellar door without any incidents and then other man starts attaching the explosives to what must be one of the central supporting pillars as Mordred guards the entrance.

It all seems to go smoothly, until perimeter-guy is suddenly shouting ‘Incoming’ into his earpiece and then Galahad sprints around the corner and throws a lighter at Mordred.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, it’s a hand grenade.’

He dives to the side, away from what logic tells him is a harmless household applicant and what his mind says is a lethal explosive weapon. The lighter flies through the entrance behind him and hits one of the stair steps down to the basement.

The explosion nearly rocks him off his feet, heat and smoke billowing out of the entrance, obscuring both his normal and infrared visuals. He can’t see Galahad, but hopefully Galahad can’t see him either. Mordred is considering shooting blind into the smoke to get a first hit when the second explosion goes off, this time making him lose his balance and having to hold onto the wall to steady himself. With a start he realizes that heat from the previous explosion of the ligh- hand grenade must have burned through the protection of one of the Semtex packages and set it off. The building around him groans and he knows that it’s only a matter of time before either the next package goes off or the instable building collapses by itself. He starts running. None of his skills can protect him from tons of concrete and steel dropping on him.

The nearest exit is 200 metres away. He makes the first 100 and then everything comes crashing down. The hairline fractures that had been forming along the walls and ceiling suddenly become cracks and then massive chunks of concrete shift against each other, pulled down by their weight. Behind him the ceiling collapses and he lunges forward, out of the way of falling plates, instinctively curling in on himself. The noise is deafening and the dust blocks his sight. It all only lasts for a few seconds, but they feel like hours to him. Next there is nothing but silence and the ringing in his ears

Slowly he unfolds himself, dust and small concrete bits that landed on him clattering to the floor. Before him, the scene clears and he can see that less than ten metre behind him the building completely collapsed. The part he had reached in his desperate sprint seems structurally intact for the time being, the walls and ceiling of the hallway still holding up even though the explosion and subsequent collapse has unleashed a small bombardment of debris into it.

The half of the building before him wasn’t as lucky. All that is left of the three stories is a big pile of concrete rumble, giant broken pieces of walls and ceilings stacking or leaning over and against each other, thick steel wires poking out of them like fingers.

He wonders if Galahad is somewhere under the debris. If, should he choose to wander the leftovers of the building, he would somewhere find a smashed and bloody corpse, its bullet- but not explosion-proof suit torn and stained. It suddenly becomes harder to breathe as his throat clenches up and he hastily shoves the mental image away. There has to come more than just one meagre explosion to kill Galahad. He hopes.

“Mordred? Do you read me?” he can hear the same handler’s voice from before come out of his earpiece. Mordred reaches up to the collar of his jacket, finding the attached micro and tapping on it, not risking speaking out loud in case of- because Galahad is still alive and out there.

There is a momentary silence in his ear piece, and then again: “Mordred, do you read me?”

It appears that the micro is dead, which is probably not supposed to come as a relief to him. Just to be sure he taps on it again, twice, but the question for answer just gets repeated in his earpiece.

“Your microphone appears to be damaged. Should you be receiving this, please blink thrice to confirm.”

He does nothing, aware that his inaction, should he be found out, will have drastic consequences. The small triumph from disobeying a direct order in a battle situation, something that would have been impossible for him only weeks ago, almost makes up for the risk.

Still, he needs to move; even if they can’t pick up sound, his eye lens seems to be working properly, meaning that they can still observe his every step and will get suspicious should he linger too long.

He can’t much of the field from the remains of the hallway, so, careful not to make a sound, he steps out into the ruins. He does a full 360 degree sweep and spots Galahad just as the other man looks in his direction.

‘Thank god, he’s alive’ is his first thought. ‘Oh bloody hell he’s going to shoot me’ is his second and then he’s diving behind one of the concrete plates for cover as Galahad peppers the spot where he had just been standing with bullets.

“Mordred has made contact with Galahad” he can hear faintly over the comm, though he mostly busies himself with returning fire from his hiding place. Galahad takes cover too and then they are taking turns between shooting and ducking behind their respective rubble piles.

One moment he is reloading his gun, the next he notices that Galahad has missed his turn of shooting. The one after that he whirls around to see Galahad sprinting at him from behind, fist raised for an immediate hit. He’s too close to stop him in his tracks, so Mordred doesn’t even attempt too. Instead he ducks and kicks his feet into Galahad’s stomach, using the other man’s momentum to catapult him over Mordred. Instead of ungracefully landing on his face, Galahad breaks his fall by rolling and is able to turn around just in time to block Mordred’s punch.

They trade blows, testing the other’s strength and speed, trying to find a weakness to use for their own advantage. His comm crackles, its channel still turned on, and then suddenly he can hear the woman shouting in his ear: “Mordred, just kill that bastard already!”

In a fluid movement Mordred takes out the knife that had been hidden in his sleeve and starts slicing at Galahad, who is forced back due to his own lack of weapon. Mordred feints and jabs and jabs and feints, while Galahad tries his best to disarm him while not getting cut. He distantly hears people talking over the comm, about how communication is down and they are sending the sniper in, and he watches as Mordred cuts through the first layer of the suit on Galahad’s left forearm, earning a punch in the side from Galahad in retribution, which does nothing to slow him down.

Galahad is going to die at this rate, he suddenly realizes. The explosion must have hit him much worse, making his movements lack in their usual grace and his reflexes dull. He may be holding his own for now, but in the long term he is no match for Mordred in this state, even now already more blocking than actually attacking.

“Sniper moving into position, upper east corridor” he hears over the comm. Time is running out. The sniper’s rifle is outfitted with bullets that, while making for a longer reload time, are able to pierce even through bullet proof material. At this rate Galahad doesn’t even have minutes to live, the only remaining question if Mordred or the sniper will get him first. He hast to get control back, now.

It shouldn’t feel so hard, fighting against his own mind, his mind that is so insistent on following orders, doing what he is told to do, whatever Mordred is told to do. And then Mordred’s knife draws blood, nicking just the edge of Galahad’s hand, eliciting a sharp indrawn breath and suddenly he snaps back. The movement that was supposed to be a devastating attack draws just a bit too short to be actually harmful and then it’s him breathing in again, not Mordred. Still, the battle doesn’t stop and Galahad takes full advantage of his momentary pause to aim a punch at his throat. He evades, but can’t block the kick to his stomach in time.

“Sniper in position, waiting for command. No clear shot yet.”

The sniper must be in one of the upper floors in the still standing parts of the building, just to his right. From his position, as long as Galahad and he continue fighting like this, there will not be a clear shot, but with the sniper’s skills there’s still a very good chance that he will hit the intended mark at this rather small distance.

“What are you waiting for?” the woman growls.

“There is a chance that I will hit Mordred instead of Galahad,” the sniper responds.

“I don’t care!” the woman screeches and he distantly wonders just what about Galahad has her in such uncharacteristic rage. “I want Galahad dead, take the shot, now!”

All it takes is one step. The sniper pulls the trigger and he takes one step to the side, right into the firing line.

The bullet tears through his body armour and embeds itself into his right shoulder blade. Pain erupts in his back, brightening the edges of his vision in white as he staggers forward. Distantly he can see Galahad looking up at the sniper and then breaking into a run, out of the sniper’s vision into the building. He sinks against one of the concrete plates, hand grabbling to reach the entry wound in an attempt to stop the blood flow, but Galahad is safe and that is all he needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments get my creative flows flowing, so please consider leaving one and making an author very happy :)


	8. Chapter 8

He makes it halfway to the get-away vehicle, stumbling amongst the wreckage of the destroyed building at a much slower speed than he’d like to. There’s a noise behind him and he whirls around, ready to defend himself even in his current, sorry state, but it’s just the sniper, walking up to him with the rifle case slung over his left shoulder. Wordlessly he takes Mordred’s left good arm and slings it over his shoulder, his right hand coming up to press over the wound in the right shoulder. It hurts like hell, but it’s doing a much better job of stemming the blood flow than Mordred’s own, by now unsteady hands.

They awkwardly trudge over the ruins as good as they can, silence between them until the sniper opens his mouth.

“Sorry about that,” he says. Mordred turns his head slightly to glance at him, but the sniper’s eyes are fixed ahead.

“Are you apologizing for following orders and shooting me?” Mordred asks, incredulous.

“I am,” the man says. He pauses, then continues: “Shooting the people I currently work with is usually something I avoid. Don’t exactly want to make enemies if I don’t have to.”

“Noted,” Mordred says. “Won’t hold it against you.”

The corner of the man’s mouth quirk up slightly. “With most people there’d be plenty of hard feelings if you’d accidentally shot them.”

“No hard feelings here. Had worse,” he answers.

The sniper looks at him briefly, looking for a moment like he wants to ask, but then seems to decide against it and looks ahead again.

 

They make it to the car where they fix a make shift bandage around Mordred’s shoulder and the rest of the journey back to the facility passes in a blur. Blood loss makes everything hazy and he doesn’t remember much except the occasional glance from the sniper to check if he’s still conscious and a few bumps in the street which uncomfortably jostle his wound.

They usher him into the facility and into one of its many white rooms, where two nurses come and sit him down. They give him a small, black gummi piece to bite down on and then proceed to dig the bullet out. It hurts like a bitch, but the occasional small cry is muffled by the gummi piece. Still, the sniper who has been standing at the door of the room looks over his shoulder back at him, visibly uncomfortable.

“Aren’t you gonna give him an anaesthetic?” he asks, but one of the nurses shrugs and tells him that they were ordered not to. The sniper’s mouth presses into a thin line and fixes his stare at the door again. Mordred wonders if the lack of anaesthetic is punishment for his failure of making sure that Galahad is killed, or just because they can’t be bothered to unnecessary waste resources like that. The sniper would probably not know either way. He had suspected before, but now with how ill at ease he seems with his surroundings he is quite certain that the man is just a hired mercenary and not someone who’s actually working here on regular basis.

They get the bullet out and drop the small bloodied piece on a tray next to Mordred together with the used scalpels, before continuing to properly bandage the wound. By the time they are done, the woman walks through the door. She looks around the room and Mordred has to do his best to not shrink under her displeased eyes. Her gaze moves on and settles on the sniper, who has drawn up to his full height.           

“We will contact you again when the next opportunity for your services comes up,” she tells him, then turns on her heel to leave.

“That won’t be necessary,” the sniper says and the woman stills in her step.

“What?” she asks icily, the tone that of someone who’s patience has run out hours ago.

“Don’t plan on working for you again, so you needn’t bother sending any offers my way.”

“And why would that be?”

The sniper crosses his arms in front of his chest. “One out of three dead, the other one heavily injured. That’s some heavy casualties for what was supposed to be just a distraction. Prefer less high risks.”

“And we pay you a lot of money for those high risks, if you can be bothered to remember,” the woman replies.

“Yeah, all the money ain’t worth shit if I’m dead. So, get someone else for your next job.”

There’s a beat of silence and then the woman grits out “Fine”. The sniper nods, the faintest hint of smugness shining through his professional façade.

“Mordred, kill him,” the woman says and the smugness disappears.

The sniper reaches into his jacket, without doubt to draw a gun he has hidden there, but Mordred is faster than him. The scalpel that had just been used to open his shoulder wound to retrieve the bullet imbeds itself in the soft flesh of the man’s throat. He sinks to the floor, hand clutching at his throat, blood starting to drip out of his slightly opened mouth.

“Dismissed,” the woman says to Mordred without sparing a glance to the dying man at her feet, and then leaves the room, the two nurses in tow who make sure to give the sniper a wide berth.

Mordred leaves behind them, but stops for a moment next to the man. Blood is starting to pool at his head, both from the wound at his throat and the blood he is coughing and gurgling out of his mouth. He can’t speak with the scalpel through his windpipe, but his lips can still mouth words.

‘Liar.’

Mordred watches as the man’s body tries in vain to get in one last breath and then it goes still. He leaves the room quietly, not saying sorry no matter how much he wants to, to beg for forgiveness from the man who had seemed to care for even just a little bit, who had helped him walk even when he didn’t need to, and was repaid with a knife to the throat. There is no point in apologizing to a corpse after all.

 

It’s dark by the time he comes back to his flat. He takes the empty pill and lies down, eyes closed, mind whirling and blank at the same time.

After a moment he sits up, digs the eyepatch out and slides it over his eye. He retrieves the journal from his hiding place. He hastily leafs past the sketches of Galahad and Lancelot’s faces, not bearing to look at them right now even though they are just pencil on paper. He reaches a blank page and starts drawing the sniper, starting with the shape of his bald head, then moving on to the features. He draws the nose, but makes it sharper and more prominent than the sniper’s broad, once broken and not properly set one. The portrait’s ears are less round and a bit more pointed, the brows a bit brushier, the lips just a sliver thinner, the edges of the jaw more square and the chin a bit less wide. A pair of rounded glasses on his nose.   
It doesn’t really look like the sniper in the end.

‘Merlin’, he writes under the picture, then after a moment he adds ‘Friend’. Then a question mark behind the word.

He leans back and huffs in frustration. He might remember the name and the face, but they still don’t seem to hold any meaning to him. He doesn’t know if he remembers him because he used to be important to him, because of the sniper looked a bit like him or because he had seen his face at the facility. Is he friend or foe? He looks back down at the one word he had written next to his name on impulse. If he had been a friend of his, where was he now? He seemed to be still alive and active, but he certainly wasn’t helping Mordred now. Had Merlin betrayed him? He seemed to be associated with Kingsman and Galahad, if the character of their code names was anything to go by, but then that didn’t necessarily exclude that he’d be working with the woman too even if their respective organizations were currently waging a small war against each other.

And while Mordred’s organization seemed bent on eradicating Kingsman, the woman seemed to take an even bigger interest in killing Galahad specifically. He hadn’t seen her lose her calm exterior ever before, so the fact that she did because she had wanted Galahad to be killed was definitely noteworthy. He wonders what the other man had done to piss her off that badly.

And what about the thing that the sniper said, how their mission had just been a distraction? From what? And for whom? It doesn’t seem to have been Kingsman, as they hadn’t been prepared for Galahad to appear at the scene. So maybe something to divert the attention of official forces from smaller, but significant details?

The pencil flies over the paper as he tries to write down all of his thoughts. In the end his hand is cramping and all he has to show for it are a lot of questions. The speculations outnumber the small handful of facts he has by far. The problem boils down to him knowing details, but having no idea about the bigger picture they are supposed to fit in. What goal is his organization working towards and why is keeping Kingsman out of their way so important?

He does know that it is something political. His failed assassination of the prime minister candidate is a huge indicator. There are also a lot of black market deals judging by the huge number of thieves and other people of less respectable business he eliminated. So they’re moving a huge amount of resources, and not through any official channels. Which means that they have access to a lot of money, but he has no idea where that should come from. The facilities front is definitely some scientific institute, but there’s no way they are making enough money, since there is not much legal working going on in behind the façade.

So he has to find the money trail. The person the money comes from is also the one who dictates the goal. And while the woman is definitely a leader it doesn’t seem like she is currently actively earning that much money. Probably. How the fuck would he know. He doesn’t even know her actual name after all. Though on the upside, if he does do some digging he might at least find that out.

But digging is very, very risky. The facility definitely has its own military trained personnel and is outfitted with its own surveillance system. What works to his advantage is that he knows the facility very well and with it all position of the security cameras in every hall and room he ever walked through.

However, should he be captured, or only his face recognized by someone, he loses everything. He can’t use his standard disguise to hide his identity as the clothing would get recognized. And even if he wore something different with the same purpose the chance is still quite big that he will get recognized from his build, what with how much time he spends fully cloaked when he is working. Plus if there were a break in from an unknown party, they would surely suspect him and if only because they’d want to check everything.

He lets himself fall back onto the bed. A break in seems impossible to do at this rate. His only alternate option would be to seek answer on the Kingsman end of the equation, but he is even less informed about their organization than about his own. If he were to visit Galahad again, chances would be uncomfortably high that the other man would recognize him as Mordred due to his injury, which stilts his arm and shoulder movement. In which case he would be lucky if he isn’t shot right on the spot, hoping to get answers would be absurd.

His one free eye slides over his room, stopping when he looks at the black armoured body suit he wore this day. Deciding for either one of the two options would be suicide, or at least an equivalent to it. But he might just have a chance to get away with it if he mixes things up a bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! A new chapter so soon! Please feed the author comments, because chapter 9 is currently being a bitch to write.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, who needs regular updates, amirite? Sadly I can't really promise much improvement for this month, as university is currently eating up most of my free time.  
> Anyway, you might notice that I updated the tags and rating a bit. And before someone gets their hopes up, I only upped the rating because a friend of mine told me that this story is way too violent and gory to be rated T, so M it is now.  
> Also, an estimated chapter count! Yay! It's a very rough estimate and mostly just a way to tell you guys that the fic isn't going to be going on forever.   
> Last thing: I'm currently looking for someone to beta this fic (as I'm not a native speaker and as such constantly fretting about all the mistakes I might have missed). If you're interested, please write so in the comment or contact me directly over my tumblr at deviantaccumulation.  
> Now, enough talk, I hope you enjoy the new chapter! :)

Breaking into a tailor shop, even one as high end as his chosen one with a proper alarm system, is laughably easy.

Choosing a suit is bloody difficult.

Of course none of them are going to be a perfect fit, after all they are not bespoke. Still, he finds himself discarding suit jacket after suit jacket. It’s only because an ill-fitting suit would hinder his movement. Or so he tells himself. But really, there are so many suits here that are tailored in the American style, which is just bloody atrocious with how the wide fabric is hanging off from one’s figure instead of hugging and emphasizing the waist. Also why would anyone think that brightly red green chequered suits are a good idea?

In the end what should have taken 10 minutes at most turns into an one hour long search, but at least he is moderately satisfied with the end product, a dark grey, double breasted suit with a white shirt and wine red tie. The outfit is finished with a pair of black, polished shoes. Oxfords, of course.

He makes sure to leave everything in its original, tidy state, sans the stolen articles of. It wouldn’t do well for his appearance in the new disguise to coincide with a break in at the tailor shop. It is already bad enough that the suit isn’t as masterfully tailored as those the Kingsmen usually wear, but hopefully no one will pay too much attention to that.

It takes three days until he can execute his plan. Three days of waiting for the shoulder wound to at least start to heal a bit, so that it won’t tear open immediately when he uses his arm. The positive thing about the injury is that he doesn’t and won’t get any missions for a while. It also gives him the opportunity to prepare for his break in, what with the current daily check-ups at the facility which he has to attend. While he does already know the layout of the building very well, he makes sure to take note of all the security cameras and the dead corners they don’t cover.

Three days have to be enough, he tells himself as he packs his bag on the final night. He cannot afford to wait for longer now, not when every coming day poses the risk of exposure and more people dying at his hands. At least shrugging on the suit over his protective body suit seems to calm down his racing mind a bit. Even though it still doesn’t fit like he wants it to, its weight feels like a familiar presence.

Once he is ready, he slips out of the window and runs a few streets, until he has a bit of distance to the apartment building. He breaks open and hotwires the next car he comes across. The facility is too far away to attempt getting there solely by running, so stealing the car is a risk he has to take. When he’s nearly at his goal, he abandons the car at a safe distance from the building, tugs on the mask and continues on foot.

The facility building stands alone, so access via a neighbouring house is not possible. The outer walls are brightly lit and studded with cameras. At the ground level, four security guards stand on the look out, with two of those regularly making their way around the building.

So really, this part is rather simple.

He uses the cover of the few decorative bushes and trees to get close to the building’s side wall. He waits until one of the two guards currently patrolling has made his way along the wall and turns around the next corner, and then dashes towards the wall. He shoots a hook with a thick dark rope attached to it up to the roof. After briefly tugging on it to make sure the hook has a good grip, he clinks the other end of the rope onto his belt, then presses a small button at the side of the attachment ring. The rope pulls taut as the mechanism starts to roll it up, pulling him up the wall. Taking large strides so as not to hit the wall he hurries upwards. The moment it is within reach he grips the edge of the flat roof with his good arm, swinging himself up and on the roof, just as the next guard comes around the corner on the ground level.

There is a door on the roof which leads into the building, but it is without doubt hooked to the alarm system. So instead he opts for one of the ventilation tunnels. They branch off into smaller ones about twenty metres in, too narrow to push his wide frame through, but those twenty metres are already more than enough. The laser cuts smoothly through the metal lining of the shaft, as well as through the wall behind it. Carefully he pulls the rectangular panel out, checking briefly to make sure no one is in the adjacent hallway before smoothly sliding out of the tunnel, landing on his feet without making a sound. He puts the panel back into the opening, making it seem like the wall is still whole at first glance. The make-shift repair won’t withstand closer inspection, but for now it’s enough as long as it doesn’t draw the eyes of one of the patrolling guards. Carefully he sneaks through the hallways, always making sure to stay out of the view of the security cameras, before slinking away through one of the doors.

The room is full of server towers, high enough to reach the ceiling. He passes by them, going to the cabinets on the side of the room. He cuts the locks with the laser and grabs a netbook from inside. His find in one hand, he starts searching for one certain cable which is responsible for transmitting the feeds from the security cameras of the upper part of the building to the monitoring room. He’s finally successful in his search at the end of the room, where a thick blue cable appears out of one of the servers, and disappears into a neat hole in the wall. He hooks the laptop up on the server and boots it up. One of the benefits of being the supposed mindless killer machine is that no one really pays attention to whether he is currently glancing their way while they type their passwords in. So accessing the security camera system doesn’t even take hacking, which means fewer traces in the system. A few lines of code, and the server starts sending video loops for a few selected cameras. He plugs the laptop out and disposes of it, then walks out of the room.

Navigating the hallways is a lot simpler without having to worry about the security cameras. He reaches the woman’s office in two minutes, the delay only due to having to evade a few guards. The door is password protected, but with how often he has been in the office for debriefing he had more than enough opportunities to memorise the eight digit number. The door clicks open and he walks in, carefully closing and locking it behind himself.

The office is minimalistic in its furnishing, no decorations, just a few cabinets and a desk made of dark wood. The walls are painted in a pale green tone and the floor is made of birch wood, though the pale tones turn into dark grey as he doesn’t dare to switch on the light so all that illuminates the room is a bit of moon light that falls through the window. On the left wall, two frames are hanging, just slightly behind one of the cabinets so that he was never able to get a proper look at them. He walks closer, trying to discern the words in the weak light. They are two diplomas, one for studies of neuroscience and the other for biomedical engineering. Remarkably narcissistic for someone who does her best to appear like an utterly unremarkable person.

He turns his attention to the desk, specifically the PC monitor on it. A bit of blind fumbling under the test has him identifying the corresponding tower and with a push on the right button the machinery comes to life. The whirring of the ventilator, normally so quiet, is uncomfortably loud in the silence of the room. The monitor blinks, then illuminates the room with its cold light. He’s just about to turn his attention to it, when something reflects the shine of the monitor back to him. Nestled in a nook formed by the monitor and a block holding an assortment of pens is a small, framed photograph. It shows the woman, clad in a white lab coat, standing with her hand on the shoulder of someone sitting in a wheelchair. Another female, pitch black hair falling like a straight curtain over her shoulders, clad in a white blouse, her back straight. The lower half of her body is covered with a dark blanket. The shapes are hard to make out, but something seems odd. It takes him a moment until he notices that there are no feet resurfacing from the blanket even though it ends a good bit above the ground. At least a part of the woman’s lower legs are missing, which explains the wheelchair.

The picture must be quite important to deserve such a special place. He wonders who the other woman is. They don’t look very similar, but with the small picture it’s hard to tell. A trusted friend then, or perhaps a lover?

Even though he’s missing the context, he files the small bit of information away and turns his attention back to the computer screen.

He accesses the hard drive and a flurry of files opens before him. There’s too many of them to start sorting through them by hand so instead he opts for a keyword search and starts by typing ‘Kingsman’ into the search bar. It takes the computer precious two minutes until it has finished sifting through all of its data. The results are depressingly numerous, though on a second glance he can discard many of them which are just mission reports, at least for now. There are still quite a few files left, but one of them is conveniently titled just ‘Kingsman’ so he decides to start with that one. The file opens to reveal a huge bulk of text and several attached photos. One of them shows a gold logo on black background, a circle with three lines arranged inside it. It’s the same symbol as the one on the medal Galahad showed him weeks ago. Kind of logical, though not very spy-esque to carry the symbol of your organisation around in the open like that.

The next photo is a satellite image, showing the bird view of a huge building, probably a mansion, the lawn in front of it marked with the same symbol just on a much larger scale. Seems like Galahad isn’t the only one with a lack of subtlety.

Turning away from the photos he starts skimming over the text. There’s a lot he had already figured out – Kingsman is a military organisation, has access to state of the art technology and weaponry, their trademark uniform being damage proof suits and glasses. However, the file also states that they are in fact a spy agency, but unaffiliated with any official forces and intent on keeping their existence secret from any outsiders. They are based in England, but have facilities in most global player countries. The file continues on the organisation’s known members, behind each of them a crosslink to a separate file. There are four in total: Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Galahad. Not exactly many considering the scale that Kingsman seems to be operating on.

He starts with Galahad’s name. The attached file is fairly small – a small photo, which he recognizes as one taken with his eye lens from when they last fought against each other, and a brief paragraph of text. He reads through it, but there’s nothing in it he doesn’t know – a list of his displayed skills, apparent partner (Lancelot), physical description. At the bottom of the file is a series of further links which lead to several mission files, all of them occasions where Galahad crossed the organisation’s path.

With mild disappointment he goes back to the Kingsman file. Lancelot’s file doesn’t yield any new information either, the photo from their second encounter on the rooftop, so he goes on to the file titled ‘Arthur’.

There’s an actual proper photograph in this file, to his surprise showing an old man with completely white hair and age spots on his face who appears to be at least in his seventies. Rather old for a spy, he thinks, then a moment later stumbles onto the bullet point Status: Deceased. Oh well. Looking back at the photo he wonders if he was killed or died of natural causes; both options seem equally possible, but the file doesn’t offer that particular piece of information. Instead he learns that the man’s full name was Chester King and that he was the head of Kingsman when he was still alive – rather obvious what with the whole Arthur Saga theme they have going on. There’s a bit about his family, old money, very influential according to the file, and then just at the bottom of the text the annotation ‘facilitated acquisition of Project 33’. His curiosity piqued, he clicks the follow-up link.

The file opens and he finds himself looking at a picture of himself. For a moment he remains frozen, just staring at the monitor, trying to wrap his head around this new puzzle piece.

‘Fuck,’ he finally mouths silently, ‘Oh fuck.’ Well, at least this answers the question of Kingsman’s trust worthiness. A small part of him keeps arguing that he doesn’t know if it wasn’t just a solo thing of King. The rest of him is screaming that he should let them all burn for the pain they caused him.

Running a hand over his face he minimizes the window with his file, feeling unnerved by looking at the photograph of himself. In the same register as his file are dozens others listed, their numbers starting with 1 and ending at the number of his file, plus a few separate ones that are marked with letters instead of numbers. A glance at the clock in the desktop corner tells him that it’s nearly 3AM and that he doesn’t have enough time to go through all of them, so instead he takes out the USB stick he had lifted from one of the lab assistants and starts the process of copying the files onto it.

Keeping the task running in the background he switches back to the list of Kingsman members, his gaze lingering at Galahad’s name. Surely he wouldn’t endorse this kind of operation. Fierce, optimistic Galahad who always fought tooth and nail against Mordred in an attempt to stop the chain of assassinations. The same went for Lancelot with her grim determination. But then, what did he know about the two agents to make that kind of judgement call? And Merlin… oh Merlin. He still vividly recalls writing the word friend under his picture, the stir of trust he had felt – but then maybe he had trusted King too, if he had gotten himself lured into this situation by him. Suddenly he feels afraid of opening the last file, wary of what he might find in it. Just to spite his own subconsciousness he quickly clicks on it.

The picture is of the lowest quality out of all four, obviously taken from afar with a low-res camera. The man in it is wearing what appears to be a pilot uniform, the ordinary attire contrasted by the rifle he is holding in his hands. His features aren’t very distinct but the resemblance to his drawing is undeniable.

The accompanying text is only a few sentences long, merely a brief rundown of his skills as sharpshooter and hacker. He finds himself mildly disappointed and relieved at the same time. There’s really not much information in the file, but at least there are no additional hints that he might have been in a league with King. He’s just about to close the window when a small window pops up informing him that someone else is currently accessing and editing the file.

For a moment he fears that he has been discovered, but all that happens is a new paragraph appearing in the file. ‘Mission status H72’ is the header, followed by ‘Location confirmed, Target: Merlin, ETA 0430, all three snipers in position’.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please consider donating a comment to the cause of 'Feed the author to increase motivation for writing more stuff'! It would be very much appreciated!


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What is this? A new chapter? Can you believe?  
> Yeah me neither. Anyway, I had mostly written this story off and not in the literal sense but in the my passion for this fandom has rapidly gone to zero and I've moved on to greener fields or something. And then I got an ask on tumblr when I was actually preparing myself to do some work on my fucking star wars fanfic and so I looked into the word document for this fanfic and read the meagre 500 words I had written months ago and then I suddenly added 1500 because apparently that's life.   
> I still cannot promise that I'll finish the fanfic. The chapter estimate got downsized and we are not that far off, but we are also not that close to the end. Maybe stubborn determination will win out, maybe it'll go back to gathering dust for the years to come.
> 
> Anyway, enough pointless rambling, here is the new chapter and I apologize for being inconsistent as fuck to anyone who might still be reading this. But I hope you enjoy it.

Only a lot of self-control keeps him from swearing out loud. This is so fucking typical, he thinks. It’s a bitter irony that the one time it’s actually important he’s too heavily injured to be put on the mission. He has no doubt that otherwise it would be him, lying on some roof or glancing out of a window with a sniper rifle in his hand. This way he at least would have been able sabotage the mission. It would come at a high price however, what with how his last one had ended.

He briefly considers a direct interference, but a quick search confirms that the file for it isn’t saved on this computer, probably because the mission isn’t finished and typed up into a report yet. And without that he has no idea where exactly the assassination will be and no possibility to try to get into contact with Merlin and warn him.

Galahad would be able to warn Merlin in time if he told him, a traitorous voice in his mind whispers. He has however absolutely no guarantee that he will be able to get out of a meeting with Galahad without being either captured or killed. Every new encounter increases the chances of Galahad finding out that he is Mordred, a situation which surely will not have a positive outcome. Or Galahad could have decided that after his negotiation attempts had failed it would be just easier to bring him in for questioning, regardless of what he has to say.

So the sensible course of action would be making his way to his flat without taking any additional high stake risks. Unnecessary risks. After all, why should he care if Kingsman loses an agent? All he should worry about is trying to get _himself_ out of all this alive, not some guy he can’t even really remember. He doesn’t care if he dies, there’s no reason he should involve himself in this mess, all he’ll do is take the quickest way home and be glad that he made it out.

His gathered determination lasts exactly two seconds until he admits that he does care and isn’t that exactly the root of all his fucking problems.

He shoves his inner conflict of selfish vs selfless (and coincidentally very stupid) actions away and busies himself with taking out the USB stick and shutting the computer down. He does his best to put everything back into the same position it was and then moves to the door, putting his ear to the wood to listen for any tell-tale footsteps walking past the door. There is no sound he can hear, so he cracks it open just a tiny bit to peek into the hallway. No sign of any guards. He slinks out of the room and starts to make his way back to his entrance spot.

It all goes well until he steps into the actual hallway. Standing there are two guards, inspecting the hole he had cut into the wall. One of them must have noticed him out of his peripheral vision as they both turn around to face him. There is that brief moment where all parties access the situation. With the proper training, such as the guards do have, that moment isn’t longer than the blink of an eye before they realise the threat and go for their weapons.

The guards are fast. Mordred is faster.

Even as their corpses fall to the floor he knows that he has been made – he can hear the trample of armoured boots coming closer, now even quicker since the shots revealed his position. Silencers are all nice and well but despite their namesake they are in fact not completely silent. He takes off, running in the opposite direction of the advancing men. Stairs and vents are out as method of escape – he’ll never be fast enough to slink away. All that remains is a much more direct and much more potentially fatal method.

He rounds the next corner, looking briefly around his shoulder to see that a squad come into the hallway behind him, shouting as they spot him. Bullets whiz past and embed themselves into the wall behind him, but he’s already out of their line of sight. What remains ahead is a T-crossroad, with a long row of high windows inserted into the wall.

He shoots five times, effectively emptying the magazine into the glass, but it doesn’t shatter until he throws himself at it at full run-speed, using his momentum and body weight to turn cracks into breaks. Glass shards patter against his suit and cut into any exposed skin, his hands taking the worst of the damage as he brings them up to protect his face.

There is a brief moment in time where he feels as if everything is standing still, the myriad of tiny glass pieces around him glittering in the light and below them a free fall of nearly fifty metres. Then the moment is over and he twists around in the air, shooting the same hook he had used during his break-in. It embeds itself into the wall just a metre below the window.

The rope of the hook is attached to a harness underneath his suit, designed to take a great amount of weight and evenly distribute the strain over his body. He still gets the wind knocked out of him when the rope pulls taut and barely manages to get his feet underneath him so he doesn’t slam face-first into the wall. There is no time to catch his breath though. Hastily he presses one of the buttons on the harness and the winch starts unrolling, taking him into a barely controlled descent. He hits the ground hard and doesn’t waste the time to wind the whole thing up again, instead hitting the release for the winch and leaving it hanging there as he sprints towards safety of the neighbouring buildings. Bullets riddle the path behind him, but none hit as he ducks into the next alleyway, out of sight.

He hotwires the next car he can find and speeds away, only slowing down to the speed limit once he’s put a few blocks behind him. He changes cars and directions, driving towards Galahad’s house.

‘I have to be completely out of my mind,’ he thinks as he pulls up before the tiny but tidy front garden. With the state his mind was currently in that was really saying something.

He rings the front bell. For a moment he pessimistically thinks that maybe Galahad isn’t even home, that he’s on some mission far away and this insane manoeuvre will have been all for nothing. Inside, a dog starts barking. JB, he thinks, remembering how Galahad’s mother had called the small pug. Such an odd choice in name and breed. He can hear movement from inside the house, shuffling and then steps, coming closer towards the door. His training screams at him to run, but he remains rooted at the spot, planting himself like a tree in face of what might, if everything goes to shit, be his last conscious and very stupid own deed before they put his brain in the blender again.

A short silence – no doubt whoever is on the other end of the door is using the small spyhole – and then the clank of a chain being disengaged and the door opens to reveal Galahad, clad in nothing more than a T-Shirt and sweatpants, the picture of soft homeliness only disturbed by the gun in his right hand, not aimed at the moment but with the safety off nonetheless.

“I cannot believe you actually knocked this time,” Galahad says with that roguish, endearing grin of his.

‘I cannot believe I actually came here,’ he thinks. Out loud he says: “There is going to be an assassination attempt on Merlin in less than two hours.”

Galahad switches to agent mode faster than he can blink, the grin disappearing as if it had never been there. “Do you know where? And when?”

“0430. I don’t know when, but there will be three snipers who’ve already taking up position.”

Galahad tilts his head, not quite assent but not denial either. Considering. “Want to tell me how you got that information? Outsiders aren’t even supposed to know that Merlin exists, y’know.”

Mordred stays quiet. Above them, the moon breaks out from underneath the clouds, its dim milky light shining onto the two figures, reflecting in Galahad’s eyes that are narrowed in a calculating stare as he searches the tiny free part of Mordred’s face for answers he won’t verbalise. Then the cold of the stare disappears, Galahad’s body posture relaxing just the tiniest bit and he feels an astonishing amount over relief that Galahad believes him.

It only lasts until Galahad’s eyes suddenly slide away from his face, merely a fraction to the side. He follows his line of sight to his own shoulder, where the fabric has been stained dark, wet liquid shimmering traitorously in the moon light.

Galahad’s gun comes up just as Mordred pulls his own out of his jacket, not yet aiming but refusing to face this with empty hands.

“You’re Mordred,” Galahad says, disappointment written all over his face and this really shouldn’t be affecting Mordred this much but the sharp pain in his chest is there nonetheless.

There no point in trying to deny it. “I did not lie to you,” he says instead. “There is an assassination attempt going to happen.”

“Yeah, sure,” Galahad snorts.

“I know that you are less than inclined to believe anything I say right now, but whoever he is, Merlin is in immediate danger at this moment.”

Galahad cocks his head, a humourless smile on his face. “You know what? I could be convinced to take some faith into your statement if you put that gun down and would willingly come with me.”

There’s an insane moment where Mordred actually considers that proposal. At least until he remembers his own name in King’s file, the fact that Kingsman definitely has a mole in their ranks and that he cannot be sure that the whole organization didn’t sell him out.

His silence must have been more than enough of an answer for Galahad, who mutters a “Yeah didn’t think so” under his breath. His fingers tighten minutely around the handle of the gun.

He’s going to shoot. Mordred knows this. There’s no way the Kingsman will let him walk away. He won’t shoot to kill, but a disabling shot for taking into custody is so much worse anyway. So before Galahad can decide which leg he is going to shoot Mordred brings up his gun and presses the muzzle in the soft spot under his chin.

“I cannot force you to believe me,” he says, feeling the cold hard metal against his adam’s apple as he speaks. “But I won’t allow you to capture me alive.”

“You’re bluffing,” Galahad says, but there is an edge of uncertainty in his voice. Ironically, he isn’t even wrong. Mordred is bluffing, just not in the way Galahad thinks. He’d gladly shoot himself if the alternative is being subjected to the torture and brainwashing again. Death is the much kinder option here. The thing is however that he legitimately can’t, no matter how much he wants to. His programming prevents him from committing suicide, just as it forces him to obey any order spoken by the woman.

Ever so slowly, he starts edging backwards, towards the hotwired car he had left running. Galahad makes as if to follow him, but is quickly dissuaded by him warningly adjusting the angle of his weapon. Without breaking eye contact he climbs into the car without looking behind himself. There is nothing more he can do here – it is now up to the Kingsman to decide what action to take. He did all he could, he tells himself, but failure is still a bitter taste in his mouth, the uncertainty of whether or not Merlin will live weighing heavily on him.

Galahad is left standing on the porch, an expression on his face that Mordred doesn’t quite know what to make of, which remains burned into his eyelids even as he drives away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just because I'm an inconsistent bitch doesn't mean I'm less of a hoe for hearing people talk about my stuff, so comments are much appreciated!


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